Implicit Arguments and Relativized Minimality
Dimitris Michelioudakis
October 2021 

Looking at a number of A-dependencies in Greek, it turns out that control relationships that are seemingly licensed by an implicit agent (IA) are sometimes possible and sometimes impossible. I argue that in the former cases the IA is syntactically present but in the latter cases it is actually absent, as its presence would block the A-dependency. If the IA were always there or always absent, the constructions/control relationships in question would not be expected to be licensed selectively. The very existence of such asymmetries suggests that IAs intervene in syntactic, and not merely semantic, representations. Such effects must be attributed to the varying feature specification of IAs and A-probes. The implications of these findings are twofold: (i) the syntactic, rather than merely semantic, status of IAs which can control into non-finite subordinate clauses is reinforced, while at the same time (ii) not all non-active constructions with agentive readings have syntactically realized IAs. (But some do.)

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006260 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Asatryan, M., Song, Y. & Whitmal, A. (Eds). 2020. NELS 50: Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, Volume 2
keywords:	implicit arguments, relativized minimality, passives, arb, arbitrary arguments, implicit control, gerunds, greek, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2021] v1 [August 2020]
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