Jairo Nunes will be giving a colloquium talk on Friday April 17th at 4pm in the Silver Building, room 509. Reception to follow in the Linguistics Department.
Title: Phi-defectiveness in Finite Clauses and Inflected Infinitivals in Brazilian Portuguese: Consequences for A-movement
Abstract:
(Colloquial) Brazilian Portuguese has several peculiarities involving null subjects of finite clauses and inflected infinitivals: (i) its null subjects behave like obligatorily controlled PRO (Ferreira 2000, Rodrigues 2004; cf. (1)); (ii) hyper-raising is possible for some verbs (cf. Ferreira 2000, Martins and Nunes 2005, Nunes 2008; cf. (2)); (iii) hyper-raising out of impersonal constructions is possible only if the infinitival is preceded by the dummy preposition de (Nunes 2008; cf. (3)); (iv) referential null subjects inside noun complement clauses are only possible if the embedded clause is preceded by de (Nunes forthcoming; cf. (4)); (v) the subject of adjunct clauses may be controlled by the matrix subject or the matrix object, depending on whether or not the matrix object undergoes wh-movement (Modesto 2000, Rodrigues 2004; cf. (5)). In this presentation I will argue that this complex array of facts follows from the interaction among the Activation Condition, relativized minimality, and the freezing effect of inherent Case, and provides new evidence for the movement theory of control (e.g. Hornstein 2001).
