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We discuss the syntactic properties of a small subset of verbs in European Portuguese (EP) that have a causative interpretation and may also have a locative meaning, namely pôr a ‘put to / make’ and deixar a ‘make’. We show that in their non-locative interpretation they are causatives taking as their complement a Prepositional Infinitival Construction (PIC), which we analyze as an AspP, but also a domain in which a predication relationship is established. We thus show that the PIC in EP, which has previously been identified under perception verbs, can also occur as the complement of causatives and we contribute to identify a new class of causatives, which are syntactically distinct from faire-type causatives. We additionally explore a decausative counterpart of one of these syntactic causatives, pôr-se a ‘begin’, which we analyze as a raising verb, close to a semi-auxiliary, whose complement is also an AspP, but not exactly a PIC, to the extent that this AspP does not coincide with a domain in which a predication relationship is established.

This paper investigates the relationship between infinitival nominalizations and analytical passives in Brazilian Portuguese. Taking Distributed Morphology as a theoretical framework (Halle & Marantz 1993; Marantz 1997), we propose a parallel structure for these formations based on the important similarities they present. Specifically, we propose that the derivation of both these structures includes a projection of a mixed nature, a Switch head (Panagiotidis 2015), which carries features of two different categories and thus can interrupt an extended projection and begin a new one. In this case, the Switch makes the originally verbal structure to become nominal. We argue that the distinction between nominal infinitives and passives is that in the former, the Switch carries an [N] feature, while in the latter, it brings an [A] feature to the structure. Infinitival nominalizations, thus, are formally nouns, as evidenced by their compatibility with determiners and different argument positions prototypically associated with nouns. In passives, this operation results in participles, which behave like adjectives: they do not admit a determiner, they have unvalued φ-features and they need a copular verb to be projected into a verbal structure.

The subject of nonfinite clauses is often missing, and yet is understood to refer to some linguistic or contextual referent (e.g. 'Bill preferred __ to remain silent' is understood as 'Bill preferred that he himself would remain silent'). This dependency is the subject matter of control theory. Extensive linguistic research into control constructions over the past five decades has unearthed a wealth of empirical findings in dozens of languages. Their proper classification and analysis, however, have been a matter of continuing debate within and across different theoretical schools. This comprehensive book pulls together, for the first time, all the important advances on the topic. Among the issues discussed are: the distinction between raising and control, obligatory and nonobligatory control, syntactic interactions with case, finiteness and nominalization, lexical determination of the controller, and phenomena like partial and implicit control. The critical discussions in this work will stimulate students and scholars to further explorations in this fascinating field.

This study focuses on an understudied phenomenon in European Spanish: por + topicalized infinitive (= por TI). This pattern is contrasted with the more common bare topicalized infinitive construction (= bare TI), e.g., por comer, come versus comer, come (both of which mean ‘as for eating, s/he eats’). Based on pertinent literature and bolstered by corpus examples, this paper formulates the hypothesis that the por TI variant is preferred in scalar contexts, i.e., combined with scalar focus adverbs such as hasta ‘even’, whereas bare TI is preferred in adversative contexts, i.e., continuations beginning with pero ‘but’. In a forced-choice questionnaire, scalarity and adversativity were manipulated as independent variables and tested against each other. The results show a clear positive correlation between scalarity and the por TI variant, whereas adversativity is not correlated with either variant. Furthermore, the results suggest that por TI is more likely to occur in exaggerated, unexpected, unreal, or hypothetical contexts. These findings are also supported by the answers to a metalinguistic question in the questionnaire.

This paper explores the correlation between clitic climbing and restructuring. In particular, it offers evidence from Catalan and cross-linguistic data to demonstrate that restructuring is universal and that clitic climbing is a facultative epiphenomenon of restructuring. In this sense, the proposal presented here claims that restructuring verbs select an embedded clause headed by a Cdef/Tdef. It also shows that languages triggering clitic climbing display a higher degree of transparency and that the (un)availability of clitic climbing in a particular language is derived by the nature of the embedded v.

This study uses corpus methods to examine a controversial topic in Portuguese syntax (Cunha & Cintra 2016): the variation of the inflected infinitive, an uncommon verbal form that marks the infinitive for person and number but not tense. Previous work by grammarians about the use, structure, and distribution of the inflected infinitive is inconsistent. Pires and Rothman (2009) argue that the inflected infinitive has been lost in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese varieties, only being acquired through schooling and/or through the media. Cunha and Cintra (2016) state that there is variation when the subject of the infinitive is an oblique pronoun. This study uses SketchEngine’s ptTenTen20 corpus (Kilgarriff et al. 2014) to investigate theoretical claims from previous literature. The advantage of web-scrapped corpora like the ptTenTen20 lies in large datasets and meta-annotation for variables of interest. Data were queried from SketchEngine, processed using R script, and analyzed with a fixed-effects logistic regression, using variety, genre, and structure as variables. The inflected infinitive was favored in European Portuguese and with clitic pronouns, with significant but contradictory effects seen for register. This study adds directly to the body of literature about the inflected infinitive in Portuguese, using empirical methods to investigate previous theoretical claims.

In this paper I argue that the position and realization of subjects in adverbial non-finite clauses in Italian, Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese can provide valuable insight into the licensing conditions for pro and postverbal subjects in finite clauses in these pro-drop languages. I first provide evidence that Tense and Agreement constitute separate syntactic heads in these languages, as argued by Belletti (1990) among others, and also apply this analysis to non-finite clauses in Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. I will also argue, after analyzing the syntactic variation exhibited by subjects in non-finite clauses (containing regular and inflected infinitives) in Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese, that (i) postverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by a full set of φ-features in Agr (overt or covert), (ii) pro is licensed by an Agr head that is overtly realized by either overt φ-features or verb movement, and (iii) preverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by verb movement to Agr.

The variability of adverbial placement in the modified infinitive construction (i.e. split infinitives vs. full infinitives with adverbial pre- and post-modification) has been widely discussed in the (American English) literature. Yet a convincing generalized explanation for the variation that simultaneously incorporates language-internal and language-external factors has yet to be found, particularly in English varieties that have not received as much scholarly attention as standardized varieties. This article investigates modified infinitive syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English (PhE) using a 135-million-word Twitter corpus. It adopts a Bayesian approach in conducting a multiple multinomial regression analysis of the said variation, with the help of Deep-Learning-based demographic inference tools. Although the conditioning effects of some factors diverge from patterns discussed in prior work, the results generally show that language-internal (e.g. stress and rhythm, adverb type, adverb length) and language-external factors (i.e. time, age, sex, geography) jointly shape the choice to split the infinitive in this linguistic style of PhE.

This study investigates the interpretation of inflected infinitives under object control verbs in European Portuguese. It contrasts the behaviour of two different types of control verbs, represented by obrigar ‘force’ and convencer ‘convince’, and belonging each to one of the two classes of control verbs established by Landau (2015). It is argued that inflected infinitives under different object control verbs show a different behaviour: whereas inflected infinitives under convencer ‘convince’ do not maintain obligatory control readings (as previously shown by Barbosa, 2021), under obrigar ‘force’ and similar verbs an obligatory control reading is maintained. This empirical observation is in agreement with the predictions of Landau (2015), to the extent that, in the set of verbs that Landau associates to predicative control, agreement inflection does not block control, even though some further questions are raised to Landau’s analysis. In the present study, a correlation is established between different types of object control verbs, their semantics, and the availability of non-controlled inflected infinitives.