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

We could deal with these and similar cases by resorting to Rizzi's (1986) idea of
Affectedness: in 0 the subject of the Small Clause is 'affected' by the process expressed by the
main verb. We could in fact go further to say that the main verb participates in θ-marking the SC
subject (i.e., the SC subject receives a compositional θ-role). If so, Belletti's contention that
Partitive Case is an inherent (hence θ-associated) Case is not falsified.
There are two other cases where the indefinite subject of a Small Clause could possibly
not be θ-marked by the verb governing it: these are the complement SC of to have and the SC in
existential constructions (if they involve a SC) (ex.s from Catalan): 21
(22) a. Tinc [ SC llibres a la nevera ]
I-have books in the refrigerator
b. Hi ha [ SC MITWPLs al congelador ]
There are MITWPLs in-the freezer
For to have, one could in fact argue that there is affectedness w.r.t. the SC subject. In the
case of existential constructions (which are a central case for the study of Partitive), their internal
predicative Structure is a subject of debate: Moro (in several papers: (1988), (1991), (1992))
claims that the predicate in existential constructions is the raised locative (there in English). So it
might turn out that the problem disappears once we have a better understanding of the
construction.
I think Belletti's theory is appealing on empirical grounds. From the theoretical point of
view, however, it is not clear that Partitive should be an inherent Case: in fact it does not look
like a Case at all, if Case is conceived as a merely formal entity of no interpretative import:
21 For these cases another constraint seems to be at work:
individual-level SCs do not allow a partitive.
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