Abstract
Since Pollock, Jean-Yves. 1989. Verb movement, universal grammar, and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20. 365–424, it is well known that Romance finite verbs move into the I-domain. However, the relationship between finiteness and verb movement has not yet been investigated in detail. The aim of the present study is to trace and analyse verb movement in various types of non-finite and semi-finite clauses in Romance, including infinitives with specified subjects, inflected infinitives, bare infinitival clauses, Aux-to-Comp (cf. Rizzi, Luigi. 1982. Issues in Italian syntax. Dordrecht: Foris), past participial clauses, and gerunds. It is shown that all types of Romance non-finite verbs move high, with the exception of French absolute participles and French infinitives. The picture of non-finite movement is thus more uniform than that of finite verb movement (cf. Schifano, Norma. 2018. Verb movement in Romance. A comparative study. Oxford: Oxford University Press). A unified account is proposed: non-finite verbs all need to be anchored to the speech act through a higher clause, which requires them to be in a local relation with the anchoring head Fin (cf. Groothuis, Kim A. 2020. Reflexes of finiteness in Romance. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Unpublished PhD thesis).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Adam Ledgeway, Ian Roberts, Michelle Sheehan, and Theresa Biberauer for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper, which is based on research carried out for my PhD dissertation. My PhD was funded by the Cambridge Trust and Arts and Humanities Research Council, for which I am very grateful. Special thanks also go to all my informants for their time and judgements. A previous version of this paper has been presented at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bucharest. I wish to thank the audiences for their comments and questions. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their extensive and helpful feedback. All remaining errors are my own.
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