Abstract
Italian infinitival NPs have played a role in my discussion of the syntax of English gerundive nominals and of the status of the of-phrase. While these NPs have received a fair amount of attention by traditional grammarians,1 some of their distributional properties, particularly pattern (I), have gone unnoticed in the linguistic literature:
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(I)a.
Giovanni udì il mormorare sommesso John heard the whisper(inf) soft
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b.
* Giovanni udì il mormorare sommessamente John heard the whisper(inf) softly
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c.
il suo mormorare sommessamente indica che egli è imbarazzato his whisper(inf) softly indicates that he is embarassed
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d.
l’avere egli scritto quella lettera non implica che tu sia fuori dai guai the have(inf) he written that letter does not imply you are out of trouble
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e.
* Gianni ha udito l’avere egli scritto quella lettera John heard the have(inf) he written that letter
In this chapter, I discuss Italian infinitival NPs in a more systematic fashion, and I propose an account of (I).
“...lasciamo stare gli aver conosciuti gli amorosi basciari e i piacevoli abbracciari e i congiugnimenti dilettevoli che di voi, dolcissime donne, sovente si prendono...”
Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (VI, intr.,31)
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Notes
Descriptive analyses of infinito sostantivato are given in Fornaciari (1881), Skytte (1983) and Vanvolsem (1983).
I am putting the V-node in parentheses, since I want to remain neutral on the issue whether the operation that makes scrivere into N is a lexical operation (in which case, presumably, no V-node is present), or a syntactic operation (in which case, N would presumably dominate V).
Notice, by the way, that the presence of a preposed adjective in (2) is compatible with analysis (20), since adjectives, presumably, are modifiers of a non-lexical projection of N.
In this respect, I disagree with Salvi who finds demonstratives acceptable with a nominative subject. I share Skytte’s view (p. 490) that only the definite article is possible when a nominative subject is present.
Rizzi (1982) has suggested that the nominative subject in (1) and (57) must follow the auxiliary in order to receive case. A different account of sentential construction (57) has been proposed in Chierchia (1984).
Reflexive si, according to Burzio, is in fact systematically ambiguous, and it may also play the role of an object clitic.
Grimshaw, unlike Burzio, does not assume that reflexive clitics are ambiguous between the argument analysis and the non-argument analysis.
Burzion differs from Grimshaw concerning the nature of this lexical rule. Grimshaw claims that the rule has the effect of deriving an intransitive lexical entry by eliminating the theme role of the verb. According to Burzio, the rule eliminates the agent role, thus creating an ergative verb.
Notice that we might expect this to be the case both under the analysis in which the clitic satisfies an argument of the verb directly, and under the analysis in which the clitic satisfies the object argument indirectly by being coindexed with an empty object position. Under both analyses, the presence of an object NP position is required for the clitic’s interpretation.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Zucchi, A. (1993). On Certain Properties of Infinito Sostantivato . In: The Language of Propositions and Events. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 51. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8161-5_7
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