Overt Subjects in Raising and Control Complements and the Null Subject Parameter

Abstract

This paper argues that control and raising (non-inflected) infinitives have overt subjects in European Portuguese, in conformity with Szabolcsi's (2009) generalization: (1) the overt subjects of control complements can only be pronouns; the overt subjects of raising complements can be pronouns or lexical DPs. It is shown that (1) constitutes a strong case in favour of a non-raising approach to Obligatory Control. Relying on the observation that all of the Romance Null Subject Languages comply with (1), we present an Agree-based theory of Obigatory Control that aims to capture the association between this phenomenon and the Null Subject Property.