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Hispanic Linguistics at the Crossroads: Theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and language contact
Edited by Rachel Klassen, Juana M. Liceras and Elena Valenzuela
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 4] 2015
► pp. 25–48

Overt PRO in Romance

Towards a unification of PRO and pro

| University of Salzburg
Several types of infinitives in Spanish, Italian, and Catalan can have overt nominative subjects. These elements are morphologically pronominal although they are syntactically anaphoric in Obligatory Control contexts and pronominal in Nonobligatory Control contexts. The data will be taken as evidence for a unification of PRO and pro to an externally merged D head with fully variable phi-features (in the spirit of Sigurðsson’s (2008) notion of ‘reference variable’), whose status with respect to Binding Theory is determined by interpretable features on T, implementing a version of Borer’s (1989) and Landau’s (2000, 2004) anaphoric AGR. In this approach, overt subjects in infinitives are the result of post-syntactic realization of D[φ:_], triggered by discourse-related rather than Case-related needs.
Keywords: control, infinitives, overt subjects, pro-drop, Romance languages
Published online: 30 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.4.02her
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Cited by (3)

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Landau, Idan
2024. Noncanonical Obligatory Control. Language and Linguistics Compass 18:3 DOI logo
Herbeck, Peter
2018. Deriving Null, Strong and Emphatic Pronouns in Romance Pro-Drop Languages. In Pronouns in Embedded Contexts at the Syntax-Semantics Interface [Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 99], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo
Herbeck, Peter
2021. The (null) subject of adjunct infinitives in spoken Spanish. In Non-canonical Control in a Cross-linguistic Perspective [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 270], ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo

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