Overt Infinitival Subjects
Anna Szabolcsi
Abstract:
This talk is in the spirit of sharing ongoing work with members of the department. Last year I published a squib entitled "Overt Infinitival Subjects (If That's What They Are)", see at http://homepages.nyu.edu/~as109/papers.htmlthat looked at Hungarian sentences of the following sort:
Nem akarok [csak en dolgozni]. not want.1sg only I-nom work.inf `I don't want it to be the case that only I work'
The squib described some data and sketched out three possible analyses, none of which seemed quite satisfactory. I have in the mean time found some important additional data in Hungarian and, with the help of speakers in the department, discovered that the phenomenon is replicated in several other languages. So now I have better questions than a year ago. -- The issue is essentially a syntactic one, but since a big part of the evidence comes from interpretation, there's some fun in it also for the semantically inclined.
Last Modified: October 17, 2006