Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

An important question arises here. Since we crucially derive enclisis with PRO o -
adjunction, and PRO o -adjunction ultimately forces the infinitive I-subject to be pronominal,
languages not having enclisis in infinitives will not behave like NSLs in infinitival constructions,
even if they are NSLs in finite sentences. Specifically, we would expect those languages to have
pronominal I-subjects in finite clauses and anaphoric I-subjects in (controlled) infinitives. 125 This
would be the case for Occitan and Sardinian. Is this prediction borne out?
Quite disappointingly, both Sardinian and Occitan are languages using pronominals qua
(strong) reflexives in an exclusive way: 126
(48) Occitan:
Jacmei parla d'eli/j (mateis)
J. talks of-he (SELF)
'Jacme talks about himself/him (himself)'
Sardinian:
Gavinii l'at comporatu pro issei/j (matessi)
G. it-has bought for him (SELF)
'Gavini bought it for himself/him (himself)'
So we cannot obtain confirmation for our prediction that these languages have a
contrasting AGR-identifier strategy for finite/infinitival sentences, although, happily enough for
125 Recall we assume that the parallelism principle 0 holds
only 'in the unmarked Case'. Occitan and Sardinian would thus be
marked in this connection.
126 The Sardinian example comes from Jones (1990), where he
explicitly states that there is no strong pronoun/strong anaphor
lexical contrast. The same is true for Occitan as far as I know:
even if literary Occitan has tried to retrieve the Medieval
strong reflexive form (se (mateis)), it is never used in
colloquial speech.
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