Gert Webelhuth (webelhut@gibbs.oit.unc.edu)
Mon, 17 Jul 1995 12:26:00 -0400 (EDT)
On Mon, 17 Jul 1995, Kai Lebeth wrote: > > I am not sure, if the sentence > > [Ein Held zu sein] macht Spass > a hero to be is fun > nom > > serves as a counterexample against the underspecification of the case > of SUBj-values in infinitives. The infinitive complement of > "Spass-machen" (to be fun) is (in the example above) a copula > construction, and copulas' objects always get nominative. That is certainly not true, cf. the example in my earlier post and some additional ones: Ich sah ihn Vorsitzenden werden Wir sahen ihn Praesidenten bleiben Wir sahen ihn einen Mann werden The same with non-verbal secondary predicates: Ich nannte ihn einen Idioten. I agree with Klaus that probably the nominative is possible, in fact, I hesitated to give a star to the nominative in my original post. Why the accusative is not possible in the example he cites, I don't know. I looked up the Icelandic facts and Andrews (1982) ["The Representation of Case in Modern Icelandic" in Joan Bresnan "The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations"] does show that predicative adjectives and nouns do appear in the accusative case when their subject is accusative, even across the copula: Hann telur sig vera sterkan he believes himself be strong Acc Acc Pu kallar pig prest you call yourself priest Acc Acc In other environments, the secondary predicate would bear nominative case and is not allowed to appear in the accusative. Restricting the nominative assignment rule to subjects of finite verbs is thus not enough, it also has to apply to the subjects of some infinitives, namely those which are not embedded under a raising to object verb. Best, Gert
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