Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
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Ana Maria Martins
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Jairo Nunes
Abstract
In configurations where inflected and uninflected infinitives may alternate in Portuguese, the option without overt agreement may be incompatible with adjectival predicates, passivized verbs, or reflexive clitics and is subject to a puzzling dialectal variation among speakers. This paper argues that the infinitival form without agreement may be analyzed by speakers as involving a T head with no ϕ-features, a T head with just a number feature, or a T head with just a person feature. Each of these specifications has different consequences for minimality computations when adjectival predicates, passives, or reflexive clitics intervene between T and the subject, yielding the dialectal variation found.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- AGREEment and ellipsis
- Coerced inflected infinitives in Portuguese
- Agreement without agree: scattered, not distributed, agreement across modules
- Two routes to predicate ellipsis in Spanish: the clitic versus focus strategy
- Rethinking Right-node Raising
- No ellipsis-contained antecedents: adjunct-licensed ellipsis in Spanish
- Sloppy symmetry under ellipsis
