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

(38) Infinitives:
a. No cal (?*sempre) dir (sempre) la veritat
Not must (always) to-tell (always) the truth
'It is not necessary to always tell the truth'
b. M'agradaria (*ja) tenir (ja) el permís
Me-would-please (already) to-have (alr.) the permission
'I would like to already have the permission'
In fact, in Chapter 4 we will make crucial use of the idea that in some NSLs V-movement
in infinitives is a slightly longer than in finite clauses. But whether or not the above examples
indicate longer verb movement for infinitives than for finite sentences, it seems clear that verb
movement in Catalan (and Spanish) infinitives is no shorter than in the corresponding finite
clauses.
For simplicity, we will assume that long verb-movement is movement up to AGR o ,
which is the highest FC in the hierarchy. The facts in both 0.a) and 0.b) will follow from the way
Nominative Case is assigned in NSLs. In fact, the essential of Pollock's (1989) initial idea that V
is allowed to move to a functional head only if that head is 'rich' can be kept under the approach
we will propose. But here we will use the clearer notions of 'contentful'/'empty' instead of
'rich'/'poor'. In fact 'contentful' does not imply morphologically realized, as we will see (the
opposite is not true: when a FC has some distinctive morphology -e.g., agreement in English
present tense-, it obviously has some content).
2.5. Case Theory
As for Case theory, our main concern will be the Case which is assigned to the sentence
subject, namely Nominative in the unmarked case, Accusative in ECM constructions, Oblique in
for-infinitives, and, we will assume, a kind of weak Nominative Case in PRO-infinitives.
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