PRO and (Under)Specification of Person in Imposter Constructions

Abstract

This paper examines a particular type of English control constructions that exhibits morphosyntactic variation. The constructions that are investigated are control that appears in the imposter phenomenon studied by Collins & Postal (2012). Using minimalist syntax in combination with the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), a syntactic account is offered that validates such variation and shows evidence for PRO in infinitives with imposter constructions, rather than a trace of NP via movement. Furthermore, comparing PRO and pro for the subject gap of control, it shows that PRO can account for binding alternations unlike pro. The current analysis demonstrates that the lack of the underspecification of phi-feature valuation does not result in ungrammaticality whereas the failure of Agree itself leads to ungrammaticality. Moreover, the current analysis offers a systematic picture of the morphosyntactic variation of English nominals in terms of the person feature and it also accounts for cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation in agreement displayed in Chinese and Japanese.