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

(80) (Peter had it done by a lawyer, but...) ritengo...
[ C o averlo+Ti ] [ AGRP Gianni [ AGR ti ] [ T ti ] fatto lui/pro ]
to-have-it Gianni done he
'I believe Gianni to have done it (himself)'
In 0, pro is licenced without its content being recovered by a rich AGR. If we assume
that AUX-to-COMP in Italian is AGR-less (just like IOS-INV in other languages), then this pro
would not require content recovery. In fact, however, this is not a plausible approach: AUX-to-
COMP in Italian, unlike IOS-INV in other languages, is a construction not allowing arbitrary or
referential null subjects, and, anyway, it would be senseless to assume that the pro in 0 is
recovered from the context, for it is acts as a resumptive pronoun.
We will alternatively assume that in this case AGR o is exceptionally allowed to be
enriched by the DP in its specifier (Gianni). This is certainly an unusual possibility, which we
did not consider thus far: 146 this would be the exceptional point in our proposal, which would
account for the marked character of AUX-to-COMP.
d) We want to account for why AUX-to-COMP is restricted to auxiliaries, copulas and
modals. We can assume that the reason for this movement is that T o has to move to C o because it
is selected (by a factive verb, for instance) or required for the interpretation of the construction
(gerunds). Suppose this selection or requirement has some further restriction: T o which is
allowed to move to COMP is one having the special property of not selecting a VP in its base
position: in compound-tense clauses, as well as in copular structures and modal-verb clauses, T o
does not select a VP, but rather, respectively, a participle (which is a FC of some sort), a non-
verbal predicate (a Small Clause) or an infinitival (if modal-verb clauses are mono-clausal and
modals subcategorize for an infinitival). It is crucial to this account that Auxiliaries, copulas and
modals do not head their own VP (which would be a complement of T o ), but are rather generated
146 In fact there is circularity in this procedure: pro
resumes a preverbal subject which enriches AGR o , which in turn
licences pro.
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