The rise of lexical subjects in English infinitives

Abstract

This paper attempts to account for the changing distribution of lexical subjects in English infinitives within the framework of the Minimalist Program, paying special attention to the role of the infinitival morpheme and the change in the category and formal features of the infinitive marker to. First, it is argued that from Old English to the 16th century, when the infinitival morpheme was present, the external argument of bare infinitives could be realized either as a lexical DP or the infinitival morpheme; then, the loss of the infinitival morpheme led to the situation that bare infinitives obligatorily have lexical subjects, as we see in bare infinitive complements to causative verbs in Present-day English. Next, focusing on the change in the category and formal features of the infinitive marker to, the following development of to-infinitives is proposed: (i) in Old English, to as a preposition had an inherent Case feature licensing the infinitival morpheme, which in turn functioned as the external argument of to-infinitives; (ii) in Early Middle English, to came to have a structural Case feature with the optional EPP feature, giving rise to to-infinitives with lexical subjects that are licensed by to; (iii) in Late Middle English, to began to lose its structural Case feature and have the feature specification with the EPP feature only as a functional category, giving rise to to-infinitives with lexical subjects that are licensed by the matrix v, as in the case of ECM infinitives in Present-day English; (iv) this specification became the only possibility after the loss of the infinitival morpheme in the 16th century, at least for the types of to-infinitives investigated here.

Agreement, Predication, and the Rise of Functional Categories in Nonfinite Clauses

“…According to her, the loss of the infinitival morpheme triggered the rise of I as a means of binding an event argument in infinitival clauses, yielding ECM constructions, raising constructions, and for DP to VP constructions. However, it is entirely possible to account for the innovation of these constructions in terms of the grammaticalization of to from P to T (Jarad (1997) and Tanaka (2007)). Moreover, other cases of historical change van Gelderen and Osawa try to capture in terms of the rise of new functional categories are typical instances of grammaticalization, like the development of do, modal auxiliaries, and determiners.…”

“…Based on this observation, Tanaka (2007) proposes that the infinitival morpheme bears Case and ø-features in bare infinitive complements without overt subjects in OE and ME, and the Case feature is valued as accusative via an Agree relation with the matrix V. Extending this proposal to bare infinitive complements with overt subjects, their structure will be as follows:…”

Bettelou Los, The Rise of The To-Infinitive, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. xv + 335, ISBN 0199274762

“…Nonetheless, it is impossible to check from these tables her claim that their THEME arguments cannot be left implicit. Surprisingly, however, she notes just above Guasti (1990), Roberts (1993), and Tanaka (1994Tanaka ( , 2007 for syntactic analyses of AcI constructions with implicit subjects where the presence of the infinitival morphology plays an important role.…”

“…Under the PP-analysis of OE to-infinitives in the recent framework of generative grammar (Jarad 1997;Tanaka 1994Tanaka , 2007, the arguments given in (10a) and (10b) could be explained away by invoking the different ways of case assignment in normal PPs and to-infinitives: P assigns dative case to its complement NP in the former, whereas to assigns dative case to the infinitival head of its complement vP/ VP in the latter. Then, the adjacency condition on case assignment would dictate that to be adjacent to the following infinitive; on the other hand, material can intervene between P and the head of its complement NP in a normal PP, as long as it is NPinternal and does not affect the adjacency between P and the entire NP.…”

“…These innovations have been accounted for in the generative literature on historical syntax by assuming that to-infinitives underwent a categorial change to TP/CP in ME (Kageyama 1992;van Gelderen 1993;Jarad 1997;Tanaka 1994Tanaka , 2007, so they pose a serious challenge to Los' claim that the category of to-infinitives has been CP since OE. She makes comments on this matter several times in this book (pp.…”