Part of
Of Grammar, Words, and Verses: In honor of Carlos PieraEdited by Esther Torrego
[Language Faculty and Beyond 8] 2012
► pp. 237–267
Taking Folli and Harley’s (2007) analysis of Italian fare-causatives as a starting point, and focusing on Spanish, I examine variation in the distribution of the subject of the embedded infinitive in so-called faire-causatives, and I suggest that there is a robust correlation between the size of the embedded complement and the licensing of particular arguments. I reach this conclusion by investigating syntactic complexity in the domain of hacer-causatives, showing that richer structures obtain when Case factors associated with dative-case-marked arguments are considered. I further show that the specific conditions imposed by these arguments are language particular and arise in the language independently of analytical causatives.