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

(72) Non keljo a vénnere tue
Not I-want to to-come you
'I don't want you to come'
The Sardinian case is specially interesting (and puzzling): what makes the infinitive in 0
a non-controlled infinitive is the presence of the preposition a 'to' before it. Without this
preposition, the infinitive is obligatorily controlled (see 0.a)). When the non-controlled a-
infinitive has no overt subject, its subject is interpreted as arbitrary (0.b)):
(73) a. Non keljo vénnere
Not I-want to-come
'I don't want to come'
b. Non keljo a vénnere
Not I-want to to-come
'I don't want someone/anyone to come'
Several proposes, which I will not discuss here, have been provided to account for IOS.
Rizzi (1982-b) deals with AUX-to-COMP. He proposes that an Aux in non-finite COMP
acquires some capacity to assign Nominative. Raposo (1987-b) makes a much more restrictive
claim (AGR has to be Case-marked itself to be a Case assigner). Although he makes several
interesting predictions (he restricts AUX-to-COMP to NSLs, and predicts which contexts allow
it), some of his crucial proposals on the precise nature of c-selection by verbs are far from
obvious, and, in addition, his proposals on Portuguese are not easily extendable to AUX-to-
COMP in Italian and even less, I think, to IOS in Romance. For IOS in Spanish, Fernández
Lagunilla (1987) simply states that Nominative is assigned by default, an attractive idea only if
we can provide means of excluding the default option for the cases when it is not possible, which
she does not even attempt to do. Rigau (1992) accounts for the postverbal position of subjects in
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