6.3 Movement to Spec IP

The unified relationship that linguists came up with to capture these three cases of Case assignment was called government. Informally this may be stated as:

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

The point of the ‘but’ clause in this definition is to impose locality on government. If a head governs everything inside its phrase, then it can govern quite a long way if its phrase happens to be a long one. Yet government is clearly a local relationship if it is restricted to the situations in (65) and there seems to be a point beyond which government cannot hold. How this point is identified and defined is a matter for discussion, with a number of positions possible. But one thing we can conclude at this point is that VP cannot be something that blocks government, otherwise the light verb would not be able to Case-mark the object in the specifier of VP.

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

The other point of view observes that it does not seem to be mere coincidence that the two instances of rightward Case assignment in (65) happen to involve accusative Case while the leftward Case assignment involves nominative. The assumption is then that there are two different processes at work here. For nominative the relevant relationship is supposed to be specifier–head agreement, something we mentioned in the previous chapter. The idea is that the finite inflectional element can assign nominative Case to whatever it agrees with, and this will be its specifier. For accusative Case however, government is the relevant relationship, though defined in a slightly different way as it is no longer required to extend to the subject. Informally, this version of government can be defined as:

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

6.3 Movement to Spec IP

Again, the ‘point’ imposes locality restrictions on the government relationships. From the present perspective there is very little between the two views that allow us to favour one or the other and therefore we will leave the matter unresolved at this point.

8.1.1 Clauses without CP

Recall from chapter 6 that the notion of government, which is relevant for Case assignment, imposes a restriction on what can be governed in that an element can govern ‘up to a point’. We left undefined what that point was in our previous discussion, but now it is important to be more precise. There are a number of ways that we might think of doing this, but one of the most intuitive is to suppose that certain nodes in a tree form barriers to government in that they ‘protect’ their constituents from government from the outside. Thus a governor may be able to govern up to a barrier, but not through a barrier. We know that a light verb can assign Case to the specifier of the VP, as this is the normal configuration in which accusative Case is assigned:

8.1.1 Clauses without CP

This means that the VP doesn’t act as a barrier to government. From observations given in (8) above, we can conclude that the for complementiser assigns Case to the subject of its non-finite clause complement, as the DP subject is only grammatical when the complementiser is present. If this is so, then IP does not count as a barrier either as the complementiser can Case mark the subject through the IP:

8.1.1 Clauses without CP

But if neither VP nor IP is a barrier to government, then we expect that the Case marking relationship depicted in (12) should be perfectly possible. There is no reason however to believe that any element can assign Case from outside a CP to any element within the CP and indeed it is a standard assumption that CP does count as a barrier to government. This supports the assumption that the non-finite complement clause of a verb like believe has an IP status and is not a full CP.

8.1.1 Clauses without CP

In conclusion, we can see that there is a class of verbs which subcategorise for exceptional non-finite IP complements. These clauses have subjects which are dependent on the light verb of the governing verb for their Case. Therefore these subjects bear accusative Case. Moreover these subjects are affected by the passivisation of the governing verb which robs them of their Case assigner. Hence they will undergo a movement to the subject position of the higher clause, just like the object of the passive verb does.

8.2.2 Control

So far, I have remained uncommitted about the status of the clause that contains PRO: is it a CP or is it an IP? Under both assumptions that PRO cannot sit in Case positions or that it can only sit in Null Case positions we have to ensure that the place where it can be found is not assigned a full Case from an element outside the clause. We have seen that as PRO cannot be the subject of an exceptional clause it must be assumed that this is not possible. One way to ensure that nothing else can assign Case to the place occupied by PRO is to assume that it is protected by a CP. Recall that a governor can govern up to a CP, but not through it as CP acts as a barrier to government. For this reason then, we will assume that all clauses containing a PRO subject are CPs and not IPs.

8.2.2 Control

While there may be more or less ‘natural’ readings for these sentences, which are determined by pragmatic considerations, it is possible to think of contexts in which the pronouns could refer to either the subject or the object in each case: perhaps the tailor in (82a) is modelling a suit for the customer and wants to show the customer a certain effect that can best be seen by looking in the mirror, for example. However there are no contexts in which we could make the subject a possible antecedent for PRO in (81a) or the object in (81b) as the referential possibilities in this case are grammatically and not pragmatically determined. We call this property of PRO having to take its reference from one place or another control. Specifically, (81a) involves object control while (81b) involves subject control. It seems that what determines the control properties of PRO is the governing verbs: ask is an object control verb while promise is a subject control verb. Obviously when there is no object, subject control is the only possibility. When there is an object, overwhelmingly verbs tend to be object control and only a very small number of verbs behave like promise and have an object and yet control from the subject.