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

(63) a. Dicitur eos venisse
Said-is them to-have-come
b. Manifestum est eum abisse
Evident is him to-have-gone
In standard accounts, we do not expect a passive verb or a copula to assign Accusative.
In the present theory any verb can assign Accusative, but:
- either the infinitival is a CP (and therefore becomes the I-subject) and the main verb
cannot govern the infinitival subject in Spec of IP,
- or the infinitival is an IP and the infinitival subject becomes the main clause I-subject,
and then it will be Nominative.
In whatever theory, it seems that Latin infinitives cum Accusative are not ECM, but
some other construction. I have nothing to say about the issue.
Raposo (1987-b) proposes that some verbs take an IP complement in Portuguese, but, if
this is correct, the resulting structure does not allow ECM (it would be one of the types of
inflected infinitive): in our terms, because, as we argued, assignment of Case to Spec of AGR is
pointless in such a language. Thus our conclusion that NSLs taking the unmarked option for
infinitives cannot have ECM is not challenged as far as I know.
Since, we assumed, Occitan and Sardinian take the marked option of having infinitival
Spec of AGR as the AGR-identifier, we predict ECM is possible in principle for these languages,
which is not apparently the Case 134 . In fact, nothing forces a language to have ECM (or raising):
134 Sardinian allows infinitival complements without control,
as we will see in section 2.4., but the overt subject is
Nominative and has the distribution of an inverted subject
As for Occitan, it does have apparent cases of ECM (see
Sauzet (1989)):
(i) Pensava las vacas manjar son sadol
He-believed the cows to-eat their fill
Sauzet argues that these cases are to be analyzed as
involving a PRO controlled by a topic adjoined to CP, since,
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