The inflected infinitive in Romance (original) (raw)

Abstract

This research master thesis aims to give a syntactic account of the inflected infinitive in five Romance languages: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian and Old Neapolitan. In these languages, infinitives can agree with their nominative subject, but lack tense, mood or aspect morphology. The analysis is based on the idea that φ-features originate on C (Chomsky 2004) and can be kept on C, shared with T or inherited by T (Ouali 2008). It is argued, however, that T in infinitival clauses is defective and therefore cannot inherit the φ-probe; this probe is instead located on another functional head (cf. Miyagawa 2010). Which functional head exactly is determined by the semantics selected for by the matrix verb. The difference in locus of the φ-probe accounts for the different word orders attested.

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