Inflected Infinitives in Romance

Abstract

In this chapter we explore the properties of inflected infinitives in Portuguese and establish a parallelism with Spanish and Italian infinitives, which are not overtly inflected. The different behaviors concerning complementation, both in finites and in infinitives, are suggested to be derived from the presence of a tense feature in the complementizer. We discuss different classes of verbs (epistemic–declarative, volitive, and factive) that select an inflected or personal infinitive in Portuguese and Spanish. All infinitives are claimed to project a complementizer phrase. The distributional properties of inflected infinitives are shown to depend on the presence of a Determiner in the structure of sentential complements of factive verbs and on the presence or absence of a tense feature in the complementizer in the structure of epistemic and volitive verbs.