Abstract
This paper discusses a class of French à-infinitival constructions, where the missing direct object corresponds to an external argument, either being the antecedent noun in an attributive use, or else a raised argument in a subject or object predication or in the tough construction.  We investigate the internal and external properties of these constructions and show that (i) the construction displays passive-like properties and (ii) control and raising verbs may intervene between the marker à and the missing object verb, as shown on the basis of a corpus study. We observe that while the construction as a whole behaves like a passive where the erstwhile logical object ends up being promoted to external argument, the logical subject is still accessible for control, both from within the à-infinitive and from outside. Building on Grover (1995), we analyse these double subjects by way of a two-step passivisation, where the direct object valency is lexically promoted to subject without concomitant subject demotion. Raising of the missing object as a secondary subject will make it available on the marker à, which finally promotes it to external argument, thereby completing the passivisation effect. The present analysis thus captures the full set of à-infinitival missing object constructions in a unified fashion, capturing its passive-like properties and the extended domain of locality.
Highlights
French missing object constructions ( MOCs) are infinitival phrases introduced by marker à that involve a dependency between a direct object (DO) that is locally missing, but that corresponds to an external argument that the construction modifies or predicates on
The first infinitive verb of each successfully identified missing object construction that was returned by the query was added to an inventory of transparent embedding predicates
As we have seen in the previous sections, the French missing object construction shares some properties with standard lexical passives
Summary
French missing object constructions ( MOCs) are infinitival phrases introduced by marker à that involve a dependency between a direct object (DO) that is locally missing, but that corresponds to an external argument that the construction modifies or predicates on. The most wide-spread use of the MOC is the attributive one, illustrated by example (1), where the MOC modifies an antecedent noun that corresponds to the missing object. This property displays some superficial similarity to infinitival relatives (Abeillé et al 1998), as in (3). The two constructions differ from each other in that the subject in the MOC can be realised internal to the infinitival clause by an optional by-phrase (see (2) and Section 2.1), an option not found with infinitival relatives
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