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

(such as the Dative in 0 can be members of an INFL-CHAIN. Another case where our version of
the EPP is violated is found in the German impersonal passive:
(29) dass gestern getantzt wurde
that yesterday danced was
Cardinaletti (1990) assumes that the kind of verbs in 0 involve a quasi-Argument. I think
this assumption is problematic: we should expect that quasi-Arguments are the manifestation of
some semantic property of a class of verbs (weather verbs, time verbs), and not a free option for
other classes of verbs. So, for instance, with weather verbs the quasi-Argument roughly
represents some atmospheric Cause Argument. No such abstract entity can be understood in the
case of the verbs in 0. Since quasi-Arguments fall under the poverty-of-stimulus learning
problem, it is reasonable to assume that they cannot vary from language to language, but rather
that they are projected because of the semantics of the verb.
One possible way of handling the above problematic Cases is to loosen the conditions on
CHAIN formation, so that we could claim that, in spite of appearances, there are INFL-CHAINS
in the examples in 0 and 0. This, however, amounts to admitting that expletive-Argument
CHAINS do not have a uniform pattern. In the case of 0, it we would have to admit that a
CHAIN can be formed consisting of an expletive and an oblique Argument (for instance the
Dative in these examples). In the case of impersonal passives -0-, it is not clear at all what the
Argument in the CHAIN should be, for there appears to be none available. So, trying to maintain
that expletives always involve a CHAIN in these cases leads to a weakening of the notion of
CHAIN.
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It seems therefore preferable to abandon the EPP as defined above.