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

Catalan and Spanish prepositional temporal IOSs (see 0.b)) not in terms of Case theory but in
terms of tense interpretation (a weak T o has to incorporate to the temporal preposition preceding
these infinitives). Independently of this, Nominative is assigned -and pro is licenced- by an
abstract AGR. Abstracting away from pro, this idea is much in the spirit of Reuland's (1983)
proposal for English gerunds with an overt subject. Galves (1991) revises Raposo's (1987-b)
proposal in an interesting way, but it is still a theory basically conceived for European
Portuguese.
Some authors assume it is AGR which assigns Nominative in IOS (Raposo (1987-b),
Galves (1991), Rigau (1992)); others (Fernández-Lagunilla (1987), Hernanz (1992), Delfitto
(1990), Belletti (1991)) assume AGR does not take part in Nominative assignment in some non-
finite sentences. Except for the case of Portuguese inflected infinitives, in which AGR is
obviously present, I will propose that AGR is not present in most types of IOS, and I will
contend that this is not at variance with what happens in finite clauses.
The proposals we will introduce here are highly speculative and far from precisely
established. They will however lead to important qualifications to the theory sketched so far.
Whether our speculations are on the right track or not, we cannot, I think, ignore the issue or treat
it in a independent way from what we have assumed so far.
We will classify IOS's in two groups, assuming the distinction is of theoretical relevance:
IOS's where, we will argue, the overt subject is an I-subject (the cases in Catalan, Spanish,
Sardinian) and IOS's where the overt subject is in Spec of AGRP (AUX-to-COMP, Occitan).
2.4.1. IOS with an Inverted Subject
Let us assume that the IOS's where the subject follows the verb without necessary
adjacency V-subject are cases of subject inversion, in our terms, cases involving an overt [-
anaphoric] I-subject. In Catalan, where inverted subjects are VP-final (with the qualifications we
introduced in Chapter 1), IOS's preferentially show VP-final subjects:
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