Search results for "subject raising"

Gerunds become prepositional infinitives in Romance Small Clauses: the effects of later Merge to the syntactic spine

2019

This article offers a comparative analysis of ‘predicative’ gerunds (‘PGs’) and prepositional infinitives (‘PIs’), focussing on perception constructions in Spanish (PGs) and European Portuguese (PIs). I demonstrate that these two constructions are diachronically related and that they still have a similar syntax. The evidence discussed suggests that both constructions are Small Clauses headed by a preposition of central coincidence. In PGs, this preposition is merged in a low aspectual projection and incorporates into the verb. In PIs, an evolution of PGs, it is merged later in the structure. This leads to a layering process, i.e. the splitting of a single head into a series of heads and tra…