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

they are anyway marked options. I do not know what might trigger (if anything other than
positive evidence during acquisition) the presence of ECM or raising in a language.
French is another language not having ECM in general, except for the fact that the Wh-
extracted version of an ECM construction is allowed (see Kayne (1981), Rizzi (1982-b)):
(64) Le garçon que je croyais être intelligent
The boy that I believed to-be intelligent
Even Italian has this construction:
(65) Il ragazzo che ritenevo essere intelligente
The boy that I-believed to-be intelligent
Verbs allowing this construction are epistemic verbs and verbs of saying (see Rizzi
(1982-b:78). Since these verbs are, unlike English believe, control verbs in the general case,
these exceptional constructions seem to require some analysis expressing their exceptional status,
which does not necessarily threaten our claim that Italian cannot basically have ECM. What is
essential here is that Spec of IP is not Case-marked, 135 for it is not an AGR-identifier and,
unlike in English, the absence the DP las vacas gives control by
the subject 'he', and, on the other hand, the DP (las vacas) can
be adjoined to a finite CP:
(ii) Pensava las vacas que manjavan son sadol
He-believed the cows that they-ate their fill
in which case the topic binds a pro. In any event, the
infinitival (apparent) subject is not Accusative.
135 It is apparently Case-marked in AUX-to-COMP infinitives,
but this is an exceptional construction (see section 2.4.). As
Rizzi (1982-b) points out, even if there is a correlation
between the verbs allowing 0 and the ones allowing AUX-to-COMP,
the latter construction is significantly more marked (high
literary speech-level). In section 2.4.2. we will challenge the
view that AUX-to-COMP involves Case-marking of the Specifier of
AGR.
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