Overt Nominative Subjects in Infinitival Complements Cross - NYU ...

NYU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 2: Papers in Syntax, Spring 2009 8speaking reader with the meanings of the sentences this paper focuses on. 2.2 argues that ournominative DP is located in the infinitival complement, and section 2.3, that it is none other thanthe subject of that complement. Section 2.4 discusses agreement with the finite verb. Section 2.5comments on the de se interpretation of the subjects of control complements.The discussion of the other languages will presuppose that the reader is familiar with thedetailed analysis of Hungarian, and will be much shorter.2.1 What do these sentences mean?The reason why this question is critical is that the nominative DPs under investigation are scopetaking operators or are modified by scope taking particles like `too’ and `only’, and in thesentences where they are claimed to occur inside the infinitival clause they take scope within thatclause, carrying what will be called the LO reading. Many of the LO readings are not expressible(without complicated circumscription) unless the language makes overt infinitival subjectsavailable. Other LO readings may be expressible, but not unambiguously. Thus the raison d’êtrefor the overtness of such subjects is to satisfy an interface need and to minimize the mismatchbetween PF and LF. I propose to interpret this interface need as one that calls for a systematicway to express a particular kind of truth-conditional content, even though in some instances thereis an alternative, ambiguous expression available. Roughly the same interpretation is needed toexplain why Hungarian generally offers a way to indicate scope relations in surface structure (seee.g. Brody & Szabolcsi 2003), even though some of those truth-conditional contents would beexpressible in less transparent ways as well, as in English.The fact that English, French, German, and Dutch lack overt infinitival subjects of the sortunder discussion has the practical consequence that the reader of this paper may find it difficultto form an intuitive grasp of the examples. The goal of this section is to set the stage by giving aninformal sense of their meanings. We use English sentences that do not have the same structuresas the Hungarian ones but have similar meanings.First consider raising. Perlmutter (1970) showed that English begin has a raising version.We use the aspectual raising verb begin instead of seem, for two reasons. One is that Hungarianlátszik `seem’ primarily takes either indicative or small clause complements and does not easilycombine with infinitives. Thus using begin lays better groundwork for the rest of the paper.Another reason is that the truth conditional effect of an operator scoping either in the matrix or inthe complement is much sharper with the aspectual predicate than with the purely intensionalone; we can get two logically independent readings. Consider two scenarios and sentence (18).(16) The HI scenario: Total numbers growing, number of first-timers decliningIn April, 4 actresses got their first good reviews and then continued to get ones.In May, another 2 actresses got their first good reviews and then continued to get ones.No other changes happened.(17) The LO scenario: Total numbers declining, number of first-timers staying the sameIn April, 10 actresses got good reviews, 4 among them for the first time.In May, 8 of the above 10 actresses didn’t get good reviews. But another 4 actresses gottheir first good reviews.No other changes happened.