Personal vs. personalized infinitives in Ibero-Romance

Abstract

The infinitives of several Romance languages can appear with an overt subject. Languages such as Portuguese and Galician feature inflectional morphology on infinitives with overt subjects – the commonly named personal infinitives, such as (nós) dizermos ‘us to speak’. Other languages, such as Castilian1 and Asturian, feature overt subjects alongside infinitives with no corresponding agreement morphology on the verb – a structure I call the personalized infinitive, such as nosotros decir ~ decir nosotros ‘us to speak’. Though superficially similar in use, personal and personalized infinitives differ among Ibero-Romance languages in their history and their uses in the modern dialects. In this paper I distinguish both structures, illustrating the morphosyntactic differences between the two. I also argue for the influence of koineization and language contact as impetus for the historical development of these forms in the various languages.