Clausal Deficiency

Abstract

This thesis investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of clauses which are considered to be deficient in some manner, which are often called infinitival or nonfinite clauses. This thesis is concerned with three types of features that are relevant to the deficiency of a clause: (i) syntactic, for instance the ability of a clause to have an independent subject; (ii) morphosyntactic, or whether the verb of the clause in question is sufficiently marked for inflectional features like tense or agreement; and (iii) semantic, for example whether a clause is fully specified for tense. The fundamental goal of this thesis is to uncover crosslinguistic patterns regarding the syntactic, morphosyntactic and semantic properties of these deficient clauses.

Chapter 1 provides a summary of the current state of affairs in the literature regarding the nature of finiteness in generative grammar and lays the foundation for the upcoming chapters, while providing a summary of each. Chapter 2, based on a detailed analysis of the infinitives of 17 different languages, provides a novel syntactic universal regarding infinitives crosslinguistically: the inability to occur with a high complementizer, building on previous cartographic work on the complementizer domain of clauses. In addition, it provides several novel implicational universals on the left-peripheral properties crosslinguistically: for instance, all languages which allow topics within their infinitives also allow wh-elements within their infinitives, but not vice versa. Also based on crosslinguistic evidence, Chapter 3 proposes a theory on the relationship between subject size and clause size: for any two clauses in which one is larger than the other, the larger clause can have a subject that is equal to or larger than a subject in the small clause, but not vice versa. In doing so, I provide a new understanding of the null pronoun PRO in control infinitives. Chapter 4 provides a detailed analysis of the semantics of infinitival tense, concluding that all infinitives necessarily lack an independent tense specification. It comes to this conclusion via both an experimental study involving the lack of temporal de re in infinitives and a crosslinguistic survey of adjunct infinitives. I distinguish between three separate types of what has been referred to as "tenselessness" for clauses in the literature. Chapter 5 provides an alternate angle to the findings in Chapter 2 and its applications beyond just comparative syntax; namely, its implications on current theories of the origins of syntax and cartography. The goal of Chapter 5 is to show that comparative syntax is able to make a mark on our understanding of the origins of language.