Deletion of Reflexive Clitics with the Verb Custar in European Portuguese: An MTC Account

Ana Maria Martins,Jairo Nunes

doi:10.5334/jpl.181

Ana Maria Martins, Jairo Nunes

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.181

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Abstract

The impersonal verb custar (lit. ‘cost’) in European Portuguese selects for a dative experiencer argument and an infinitival clause, which may be preceded by the preposition a. Interestingly, a reflexive clitic co-referential with the experiencer argument can be deleted (under conditions to be specified) if it is within the prepositional infinitival complement, but not within its prepositionless counterpart. We argue that the presence of the preposition a preceding the infinitival complement of custar correlates with obligatory control and show how deletion of reflexive clitics within the prepositional infinitivals can be captured under the movement theory of control (MTC; see e.g. Hornstein 1991, 2001; Boeckx, Hornstein and Nunes 2010). More specifically, we show that if the infinitival subject is a deleted copy left by the “controller”, this copy can trigger deletion of the reflexive clitic as a way to satisfy a superficial ban on morphologically identical clitics in a local domain.

Highlights

The impersonal verb custar ‘cost’ in European Portuguese presents us with an interesting puzzle.1 At first sight, all that needs to be said about it is that its infinitival complement may be optionally preceded by the preposition a ‘to’, with a corresponding subtle difference in meaning, as illustrated in (1) below
A reflexive clitic in the infinitival clause co-referring with the matrix experiencer must sometimes be deleted in the prepositional version but not in its prepositionless counterpart, as exemplified by the contrast in (2)
Concluding remarks The movement theory of control (MTC) has all the ingredients to provide an account for the curious problem brought up by (59) (= (2)), which shows that reflexive clitics may be deleted in the infinitival complement of custar when it is used as an obligatory control verb

Summary

Introduction

The impersonal verb custar ‘cost’ in European Portuguese presents us with an interesting puzzle. At first sight, all that needs to be said about it is that its infinitival complement may be optionally preceded by the preposition a ‘to’, with a corresponding subtle difference in meaning, as illustrated in (1) below. The impersonal verb custar ‘cost’ in European Portuguese presents us with an interesting puzzle.. All that needs to be said about it is that its infinitival complement may be optionally preceded by the preposition a ‘to’, with a corresponding subtle difference in meaning, as illustrated in (1) below. Custar may select for either a prepositionless or a prepositional infinitival as a matter of lexical subcategorization. Cost-meCL.DAT write-INF the report ‘Writing the report was hard on me.’. Cost-meCL.DAT to write-INF the report ‘It was hard for me to succeed in writing the report.’. A reflexive clitic in the infinitival clause co-referring with the matrix experiencer must sometimes be deleted in the prepositional version but not in its prepositionless counterpart, as exemplified by the contrast in (2)

Objectives

Conclusion