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

Actually, there are some exceptions to this general pattern: some unergative verbs do not
show any object at all (except that ABS-AGR appears in the third person singular). These verbs
have increased in number as borrowings from Romance languages have entered Basque. So they
could be considered marked options having a kind of null object. Or we could assume that
modern Basque has set a parametric option similar to the one taken by German: ABS-AGR has
to coindex with an object if there is one.
Basque is actually an atypical EL (see Ortiz de Urbina (1989)). The Case array is
different in other ELs and the parametric formulation above could turn out not to fit other ELs. I
cannot pursue the question here.
1.3. A Problematic Case
Since languages like English or the Romance languages have neither impersonal passives
nor verbs like those in 0 in general, it seems that these languages set the other parametric option
in 0. If so, in all sentences AGR is coindexed with some Argument (DP or CP). This seems to be
the case at first glance, but there are some apparently problematic cases. Consider the Catalan
verb semblar 'to seem'. 54 We have assumed, in accordance to the GB tradition, that in its raising
version semblar subcategorizes for an IP. So AGR is coindexed with some DP inside the IP,
since there is no other DP available in the main sentence. Now, when semblar subcategorizes for
a CP finite complement, it is this CP itself that will be coindexed with AGR: this is at least what
0 predicts.
That CPs are possible candidates to be coindexed with AGR is a plausible assumption:
this is likely the case for examples like the following:
54 The facts we will be considering are from Catalan. To my
knowledge, they are essentially the same as in Spanish. We will
consider Italian below.
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