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

under a FC: perhaps under T o itself. If this last suggestion was correct, we could even
reformulate the theory another way: only verbal forms which are generated under T o can raise to
C o to satisfy selectional restrictions involving T o .
In fact, there is a more appealing possibility: let us assume that the T o which can move to
COMP in AUX-to-COMP has to be one not selecting an event:
- Modals select a proposition which would take the form of an infinitive.
- As for compound-tense auxiliaries, even if the clause contains an eventful VP, the
auxiliary does not carry the Tense interpretation for the event itself, but rather the tense
interpretation for the reference time (At five o'clocki, John had-Ti already finished-Tj), which is
not eventful itself. 147
- As for copulas, it is harder to contend that they do not select an event, if the predicate is
stage-level (see Kratzer (1988)), unless we assume that some (meaningful) FC intervenes
between the copula and the stage-level Small Clause.
These are rather speculative considerations. I leave the issue here.
We can assume that AUX-to-COMP in Portuguese is licenced in a similar way. The
obvious difference between AUX-to-COMP in Italian and in Portuguese is that in the latter AGR
is morphologically present. Our theory predicts, if nothing else is said, that inflected infinitives
are essentially like finite clauses as far as AGR and subjects are concerned. In fact, as shown by
Raposo (1987-b), there are many restrictions on the distribution of infinitival overt AGR. We
cannot address the issue here. The optimal situation for our theory would be that these
restrictions are the result of the interaction of factors other than AGR, such as:
COMP).
- the AUX-to-COMP trigger (which we have assumed is ('event-less') T o raising to
147 See, e.g., Giorgi (1992) for an implementation of the
idea that in compound tenses the Reference time and the Event
time are expressed in different positions in the syntactic
structure.
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