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

should be able to derive the existence of IOS-INV from the NSL status.
Concerning this last desideratum, it could be the case that IOS with a [-anaphoric] I-
subject is parasitic on the existence on long V-movement in infinitives, which, crucially in our
theory, allows Nominative assignment through Chain-government, and in turn would be parasitic
on the existence of such a long movement in controlled/raising constructions, taking control to be
a core case of infinitive that learners use to set parametric options in this field of grammar.
The idea then would be that once there is long V-movement, Nominative assignment by
government is possible, even if AGR does not take part in the process. Our previous proposal
concerning Case is that the AGR-identifier must provide Case to its I-subject. If it is Spec of
AGR, it must transmit its Case to the I-subject. If it is AGR o , we claimed, it must Case-mark the
I-subject.
Suppose we assume, alternatively, that the requirement is of the type: the AGR-identifier
must participate in providing Case to the I-subject. If it is Spec of AGR, we have Case
transmission. If it is AGR o , and therefore Case is provided by (Chain-)government, it must
combine with a head that is the actual Nominative Case-marker by government: T o . Thus it is not
only finite T o which is a Nominative assigner, as has been claimed so often: the fact that
infinitival T o is not apparently able to assign Case would be due to the independent requirements
on AGR, that must participate in the process, if AGR is (forced to be) present. If AGR is not
present, then T o can assign Nominative by itself. Why can it not in non-NSLs? The idea would
be that in NSLs the case where T o assigns Nominative by itself (in IOS) is not at variance with
the case where T o combines with AGR o . Suppose we rephrase the parallelism principle 0 above
as:
(77) In the unmarked Case, the I-subject in infinitives obtains Case in the same way as in
finite sentences (where 'same' means involving sets of processes that are 'unifiable' in the
set-theoretical sense). 142
142 An alternative (and only apparently simpler) formulation
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