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

for Occitan, it is certainly better behaved in this connection: as we saw in 0/0, IOS are (rather)
constructed with preverbal subjects. As far as I know, IOS's with inverted subjects are marginal.
Now let us address question 0.b): what licences (referential) pro in IOS-INV? We have
assumed, in the spirit of Rizzi (1986), that pro requires recovery of content. I think it would be
senseless to assume that an abstract AGR can recover the content of pro, for this would void the
traditional intuition that pro is allowed as far as its content is overtly expressed in a head.
The solution we will propose is similar in spirit to the one we have proposed for
Nominative assignment in the absence of AGR. The idea is that:
(78) AGR, if present in a clause, must be rich enough to licence an empty I-subject (which
will be [±anaphoric] depending on the (non) Null Subject status of the language).
0 is a concise expression of what we have assumed thus far for AGR-licensing, except
that we did not consider the possibility of AGR being absent. If it is absent in IOS-INV in a NSL,
then the null I-subject being [-anaphoric] (pro) will not be required to be identified by AGR, and
some other device (such as context recovery) takes place.
The idea advanced here about 'free' pro is obviously a simplification: we cannot account
for why pro can be fully referential in some IOS-INV (e.g., Catalan and Spanish prepositional
infinitives) and only arbitrary in others (e.g., Sardinian non-controlled complements). A
comprehensive account should even account for cases of null objects (if they are indeed pro, as
in Rizzi's (1986) proposal about Romance).
I think the account for the referentiality of 'free' pro should be expected to be derived
from independent modules concerning context recovery (referential pro) and unselective Binding
by sentence operators (arbitrary pro -and PRO), which should interact to allow only the attested
cases. 145
145 See Authier (1991) for an account of Romance null objects
in terms of unselective binding.
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