CAPITULO II MARCO TEÓRICO
FORTALECIMIENTO DE LA RED INSTITUCIONAL.
The process of accounting for the underlying structure of sentences like (18) has been fraught with conflict.
(18) John believes [Tom to be a fool]
Such sentences are alternately referred to as raising-to-object or exceptional case marking structures, depending upon a researcher’s personal theoretical leanings. Here I will briefly discuss several accounts of these sentences.
Postal(1974) provided an early raising-to-object (RO) account of sentences like (18) which argued that in certain constructions, the subject of an embedded infinitival clause could raise to become the object of the matrix verb. As two (of the many) pieces of support for this analysis, he showed first that Right Node Raising (19a) is ungrammatical for an embedded infinitival clause (19b), indicating that it is not a constituent in itself.
(19) a. I think, but no one else does, that peppermint ice cream is yummy
b. * John believes, but no one else does, Tom to be a fool
Second, adverbs may grammatically appear between verbs and complement sen- tences (20a), but not between verbs and objects or embedded infinitivals (20b).
5Among the first to document such an effect was
Rosenbaum(1967), who formulated a M(inimal) D(istance) P(rinciple) that governed the erasure of an embedded complement subject. Many researchers have since adopted the term MDP to refer to this PRO coreference effect.
(20) a. I believe adamantly that you are up to no good
b. * I love adamantly you / I believe adamantly Tom to be a fool
Thus, the NP subject of the embedded infinitival must have raised to object po- sition in the matrix clause.
However, movement of an NP from the subject of an embedded infinitival into the object (i.e., verbal complement) position of the matrix verb violates theθ-Criterion, since such movement would result in the NP bearing twoθ-roles; movement intoθ-marked positions is therefore barred (Chomsky, 1981). As an alternative to the RO account, Chomsky (Chomsky,1981,1986;Chomsky and Lasnik,1993) proposes a process of exceptional case marking (ECM), according to which a verb may “exceptionally” assign Case to the NP subject of an embedded infinitival clause.6 This account allows Chomsky to maintain the θ-Criterion and the projection principle in their strongest forms, such that there are no subjectless infinitives at any point in a derivation.
Postal and Pullum (1988) note that Chomsky’s ECM account depends cru- cially on the assumption that expletive elements cannot appear in subcategorized (i.e.,θ- marked) positions (e.g.,*John saw there/it, wherethere/itare nonreferential); they then proceed to argue against this assumption by providing what appears to be evidence of expletives in subcategorized positions, including objects of verbs (21a) and prepositions (21b) and what they refer to as “unlinked expletives” (21c).
(21) a. The Lord stopped it from raining
The mayor prevented there from being a riot
6
Chomsky(1981) initially posits that ECM results from a marked rule of S’-deletion which deletes the barrier to government of an infinitival subject NP by the verb, while he later proposes that ECM verbs simply select for an S (not S’ – nor CP, on more current assumptions) complement (Chomsky, 1986). Chomsky and Lasnik(1993) are basically mute on the issue. Accepting theChomsky(1981) version, the structure of such ECM sentences is as in (i); this contrasts with the structure of an embedded finite clause (ii).
i. John [V P believes [S Tom to be a fool]] ii. John [V P believes [S’ that [S Tom is a fool]]]
b. John can depend on it that Bill will come
c. dish it out, have it out with, keep it up
Postal and Pullum argue that, given this data, the claim that expletives may not appear in θ-marked positions—and thereby the basic objection to an RO analysis of sentences like John believes Tom to be a fool—can no longer be maintained.7
Lasnik and Saito (1991) are also sympathetic to an RO analysis for sentences like (18), but argue that Postal and Pullum’s argumentation is ineffectual, consid- ering the fact that there is little correlation between verbs that will accept an expletive object and those that take infinitival complements with overt subjects, as illustrated in (22).
(22) a. i. I dislike it that he is so cruel
ii. * I dislike him to be so cruel
b. i. I regret it that we could not hire Tom
ii. * I regret us not to have hired Tom
On the other hand, they note, the stereotypical examples of “B(elieve)-raising” verbs8 do not appear to accept expletive objects (
23).
7The argument that expletive itappears inθ-marked positions is less impressive when we consider Chomsky (1981)’s suggestion that this lexeme actual does carry a θ-role, namely the “#” θ-role of a quasi-argument. However, this line of reasoning does little to explain away examples such as The mayor prevented there from being a riot, sincethereis always considered a full expletive, rather than an argument or quasi-argument.
8As
Postal (1974) notes, the B(elieve)-verbs contrast with the W(ant)-verbs, whose inclusion in the class of RO verbs is somewhat questionable. Note, for instance, the contrast between active and passive forms of B-verbs (i) and W-verbs (ii). W-verbs may in fact prove to constitute a class of their own, apart from other RO verbs.
i. Neil believes Suki to be a coffee-drinker / Suki is believed to be a coffee-drinker ii. Neil wants Suki to be a coffee-drinker / *Suki is wanted to be a coffee-drinker
(23) a. I believe (??it) that John left
b. I will prove (?*it) that Mary is the culprit
c. They have found (*it) that there is a prime number greater than 17
Lasnik and Saito provide a different type of evidence for an RO analysis by il- lustrating that the subject of each infinitival behaves just like a regular complement as far as binding facts are concerned (Lasnik and Uriagereka, 2005). They show that antecedents of reciprocals and anaphors (24a), c-commanding negative elements (24b), and binomial ‘each’ antecedents (24c) may grammatically appear in such an embedded clause when the element that must be c-commanded is in an adjunct clause.
(24) a. The DA proved [the defendants to be guilty] during each other’s trials
b. The DA accused [none of the defendants to be guilty] during any of the trials
c. Jones proved [the defendants to be guilty] with one accusation each
The grammaticality of these sentences indicates that the c-commanding element must raise to the object of the matrix verb, leaving it high enough to c-command into the adjunct. On the basis of these facts, the authors argue that raising of the embedded subject to object position must happen prior to S-structure, as proposed in Postal (1974).
Minimalism (Chomsky,1995) is able to evade this issue somewhat by interpreting ECM as raising of an embedded infinitival subject to [Spec, AgrO]. This analysis thus allows for subjects to move to a position where objects, too, are hypothesized to raise. However, only Case features (and not θ-role features) are checked in [Spec, AgrO] (25) (see alsoLasnik and Uriagereka,2005).9
9The triangle under the DPs containing the names “John” and “Tim” is for expository convenience. SeeLongobardi(1994) for more details on proper names and DPs.
(25) AgrsP DP Johni Agrs0 Agrs TP T0 T V believesj T -past AgroP DP Tomk Agro0 Agro VP DP ti V0 V tj AgrsP DP tk T0 to be a fool
The Minimalist view of these constructions thus seems to be a marriage of what were previously diametrically opposed RO and ECM accounts.
In the interest of brevity, I will gloss over this controversy in the coming chapters by continuing to refer to such constructions as raising-to-object (RO) constructions. In the interest of clarity (and so as to not drown the reader in unnecessary functional projections), I will also primarily present the utterances in question in bracketed, rather than tree, form.
However, the experimental results presented here bear strongly on this controversy, as will be clear in later chapters. I will ultimately return to this issue by discussing the data that I believe may instead force us in the direction of the ECM analysis. At that point, I will present what I believe to be the correct syntactic representation of these constructions.