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

- incompatibility between (lexical) control and overt AGR: it must be the same restriction
which prohibits PRO in finite sentences.
As for the Occitan examples in 0/0, they seem involve a subject in Spec of AGR, not an
I-subject. Since we have assume that Occitan takes the marked option in the parallelism
principles (i.e., Occitan infinitives have Spec of AGR as the AGR-identifier), these facts are not
at odds with the present theory. These examples would be similar to English gerunds with an
overt subject. I will not address the issue of what licences non-finite clauses having an overt Spec
of AGR (hence an AGR not involving control, raising or ECM).
* * *
The above contention that T o is the basic Nominative Case-marker by government leads
to another speculation: the way we have formulated Nominative assignment through agreement,
T o cannot take part in this process, for this manner of assignment does not require T raising,
manifested as long V-movement (English is an instance of language without obligatory long-V-
movement in finite sentences). Therefore, Nominative through government and Nominative
through agreement could actually be different Cases. It is noteworthy, in this connection, that
non-NSLs tend to develop pronominal forms which show a Case form which exclusively occurs
in Spec of AGR (e.g., in colloquial English he is not used outside Spec of AGR, contrary to
Italian lui 'he', which can appear in postcopular position and in dislocated position). So forms like
himself, French lui, which we take as Nominative when they are I-subjects, and must be non-
Nominative in other cases, would be neutral forms: English (and French) would have no Case
distinction except for pronominal agreement-Nominative forms. 148
148 In Chapter 3 we commented on these facts in another
sense: these Spec-of-AGR-only pronominal forms would be AGRidentifier
forms, which, diachronically, tend to cliticize to
AGR o to become (unmarked) AGR o AGR-identifiers. I think both
ideas (Case singularity and AGR-identifier singularity) can
converge in a natural way, perhaps one being derived from the
other. The fact that these Case distinctions are exclusively
pronominal suggests that the AGR-identifier singularity is more
basic, for pronominals, unlike full DPs, are minimal sets of
AGR-features.
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