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languages, and it potentially runs into problems for Sardinian, where it is not clear why 'if'-
infinitives are not possible, and, besides, for cases like 0, 0 and, more conclusively, 0.
If we assume that I o can govern its PRO specifier then Sardinian ought to allow 'if'-
infinitives as we argued. Suppose we assumed that Sardinian infinitival V-movement, although
very 'long' (almost as long the Italian one) does not however reach the I o whose specifier contains
PRO, but rather stops a step short of it. Then, the Sardinian status would be essentially the same
as the French one: an empty I o is unable to govern and the 'if' C o really matters. Although this
position is tenable for Kayne, it undermines the cruciality of the V-adjoining-to-I' proposal: we
could simply assume that long movement is movement to I o , (which for some reason implies
enclisis), and that suffices to prevent C o to be the exclusive governor of PRO. In languages with
short movement (and now Sardinian is not relevantly different from English, French or Occitan)
I o is empty and C o is the exclusive governor. So the idea of adjunction to I' is, at best, less
motivated than Kayne claims it is.
There is another problem of a rather speculative nature. In both Chomsky's and in
Kayne's proposal (implicitly in the latter), the notion of CFC plays an essential role in the
definition of Binding Domain: since only a CFC can be a Binding Domain, whenever a CFC
(such as the infinitival IP) fails to be a Binding Domain (because the governor is outside it or it
does not satisfy virtual binding requirements) then the Binding Domain switches to the whole
next IP up. The CP or VP immediately dominating the IP are not possible candidates simply
because they are not CFCs. At the time Chomsky formulated his proposal, he assumed a still
fairly simple structure for the sentence (the S'/S category) and, specifically, he did not consider
the internal subject hypothesis at all: (NP,S) was the θ-position for at least external Arguments,
so S (=IP) was clearly the minimal constituent containing all the θ-positions of a clause (at least
in agentive clauses), thus a CFC.
The moment the internal subject hypothesis is assumed, however, things are not so
simple: it could be argued that VP max (in Koopman & Sportiche's (1988) sense) is the (minimal)
CFC. Similar problems would arise in connection to the DP hypothesis if we generate nominal θ-
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