Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 3. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 29)
Csaba Ceglédi: On the Constituent Structure of Infinitives and Gerunds in English
INFINITIVES AND GERUNDS IN ENGLISII 89 b. *John talked with Mary about each other. The verb propose has the remarkable property that it allows its subject and prepositional object arguments to jointly determine the reference of the understood subject of the complement (split-control): (41) John proposed to Mary to go to the movies. On the most natural reading of (41), it means that 'John suggested to Mary that they go to the movies'. In other words, the understood subject in (41) behaves like they in (40): both are coreferential with two distinct NPs, that is, both have split antecedents. Now consider (42) with each other in the complement, which requires a unary antecedent: (42) John proposed to Mary to help each other. The fact that (42) is grammatical, that John and Mary cannot be the direct split antecedents for each other ; and third, that each other requires the presence of a unary antecedent show that it has the following structure: (43) lohn ; proposed to Mary ; [PRO,- to help each other •]. These considerations again show that we must postulate a phonetically empty category as the subject of nonfinite complements in English, which entails that they are clauses. 2.14 The Problem of'VP-Complementizers' As noted by Riemsdijk and Williams (1986:135), the existence of sentences like (44) creates serious problems fof the VP hypothesis, on which it is claimed that all infinitives are base-generated in their surface form, that is as VPs, and as such they obviously do not contain PRO subjects. (44) John wonders what PRO to do. On the VP hypothesis, in order for the grammar to generate the structure of such sentences, VPs must be assumed to contain a C position (into which the wh- word is moved from its base-generated 0position). If, however, VPs are of the structure
