Andrew Radford - Linguistics An Introduction [Second Edition]

nature. In traditional grammar, it is claimed that subjectless infinitive clauses have an understood or implicit subject – and positing a PRO subject in such

clauses is one way of capturing the relevant intuition. The implicit subject becomes explicit if the relevant clauses are paraphrased by a clause containing an auxiliary like will, as we see for the paraphrase for (298a) below given in

(298b):

(298) a.

The president hopes [to be re-elected]

b.

The president hopes [he will be re-elected]

The fact that the bracketed clause in (298b) contains an overt (italicised) subject makes it plausible to suppose that the bracketed clause in (298a) has a covert PRO

subject.

There is also syntactic evidence in support of claiming that subjectless infinitive clauses have a covert PRO subject. Part of this evidence comes from the syntax of reflexives (i.e.-self/-selves forms such as myself/yourself/himself/themselves, etc.). As examples such as the following indicate, a reflexive generally requires a local (i.e. ‘nearby’) antecedent:

(299) a.

They want [John to help himself ]

b.

*They want [John to help themselves]

In the case of structures like (299), a local antecedent means ‘an expression which the reflexive can refer back to within the same (bracketed) clause’. Thus, (299a) is grammatical because it satisfies this locality requirement: the antecedent of the reflexive himself is the noun John, and John is contained within the same

bracketed help-clause as himself. By contrast, (299b) is ungrammatical because the reflexive themselves does not have a local antecedent (i.e. it does not have any expression it can refer back to within the bracketed clause containing it); its antecedent is the pronoun they, and they is part of the want-clause, not part of the bracketed help-clause. In the light of this locality requirement, consider how we account for the grammaticality of the following:

(300)

John would like [to prove himself]

Given that a reflexive needs a local antecedent, the reflexive himself must have an antecedent within its own (bracketed) clause. This requirement will be

satisfied if we assume that the bracketed complement clause has a PRO subject, as in (301):

(301)

John would like [PRO to prove himself]

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We can then say that himself has an antecedent within the bracketed clause

containing it, since himself refers back to PRO. Because PRO in turn refers back to John, this means that himself refers to the same person as John.

The claim that apparently subjectless infinitive clauses have a null PRO subject enables us to maintain the definition of a clause as a subject + predicate structure which we gave earlier. If there were no PRO subject for the bracketed clause in

(300), the predicate prove would have no subject of its own, and hence it would be impossible to maintain the assumption that every clause contains a subject as well as a predicate.

The overall conclusion to be drawn from our discussion up to now is that

clauses are TP structures of the form subject + T + complement: the subject is an overt or covert pronoun or nominal (i.e. noun-containing) expression, T is occupied by an overt or covert auxiliary, affix or infinitive particle, and the complement is a verb or verb phrase. So far, we have not discussed the possibility of complements being covert. We now turn to this.

Covert complements

Just as both T and its subject can be covert, so too the complement

of T can be covert in structures where it undergoes ellipsis. For example, in a dialogue such as (302) below, speaker B’s reply is understood as an elliptical form of He may resign:

(302)

speaker a: Do you think he will resign?

speaker b: He may.

We might accordingly suggest that the auxiliary may has a null complement, and that the sentence He may has the structure (303):

(303)

TP

PRN T'

He

T V

may

ϕ

In (303), φ is understood as having the same grammatical and semantic features as resign, differing from resign only in that it has no phonetic features (and so is

‘silent’). If this is so, clauses are always TPs of the form subject + T + complement, and the subject may be overt or covert, T may be overt or covert, and the complement may be overt or covert.

Empty complementisers

The overall conclusion to be drawn from our discussion to this point is

that all clauses contain an overt or null T constituent which marks properties such

Empty categories

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as tense. However, given that clauses can be introduced by clause-introducing particles such as if/that/for (traditionally called conjunctions, but in more recent work termed complementisers), a natural question to ask is whether apparently complementiserless clauses can likewise be argued to be CPs headed by a null complementiser. This is what we argue now.

Consider the following:

(304) a.

We didn’t know [if he had resigned]

b.

We didn’t know [that he had resigned]

c.

We didn’t know [he had resigned]

The bracketed complement clause is interpreted as interrogative in type in (304a)

and declarative in type in (304b), and the force of the clause (i.e. the type of clause it represents) is determined by the choice of italicised complementiser introducing the clause: in other words, the bracketed clause is interrogative in force/type in

(304a) because it is introduced by the interrogative complementiser if, and is declarative in force in (304b) because it is introduced by the declarative complementiser that.

But now consider the bare (i.e. seemingly complementiserless) clause in (304c):

this can only be interpreted as declarative in force (not as interrogative), so that

(304c) is synonymous with (304b) and not with (304a). Why should this be? One answer is to suppose that the bracketed bare clause in (304c) is a CP headed by a null variant of the declarative complementiser that (below symbolised as φ), and that the bracketed complement clauses in (304a, b, c) have the structure (305)

below:

(305)

CP

C

TP

if/that/ϕ

PRN

T'

he

T V

had resigned

Given the analysis in (305), we could then say that the force of a clause is determined by the choice of complementiser in the clause; in (304a), the clause is a CP headed by the interrogative complementiser if and so is interrogative in force; in (304b), it is a CP headed by the declarative complementiser that and so is declarative in force; and in (304c), it is a CP headed by a null declarative complementiser φ and so is likewise declarative in force. More generally, the null C analysis would enable us to arrive at a uniform characterisation of all finite clauses as CPs in which the force of a clause is indicated by the force feature carried by an (overt or null) complementiser introducing the clause.

Empirical evidence in support of the null C analysis of bare complement clauses like that bracketed in (304c) comes from co-ordination facts in relation to sentences such as the following:

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(306)

We didn’t know [he had resigned] or [that he had been accused of

corruption]

In (306), the italicised bare clause has been co-ordinated with a bold-face clause which is clearly a CP since it is introduced by the overt complementiser that.

If we make the traditional assumption that only constituents of the same type can be co-ordinated (see section 19), it follows that the italicised clause he had resigned in (306) must be a CP headed by a null declarative complementiser because it has been co-ordinated with a bold-face clause headed by

the overt declarative complementiser that – as shown in simplified form in