30 Steven Franks
What this means is that T or v, as the functional categories which assign structural
nominative or accusative, respectively, probe multiply, valuing case not just on their
goal DP but also on PRO, when C lacks φ-features, or on C, when it has them. Since
the semipredicative agrees with PRO, this means that the former gives rise to case
transmission and the latter gives rise to dative, valued on PRO by C[φ].
For our present purposes, there are two aspects of Landau’s study worth noting.
As discussed in Section 2.2, foremost is his contribution to our understanding of varia-
tion in judgments about the viability of agreement in certain traditional SD contexts.
Also significant is the fact that in Landau’s system C is crucially involved in assigning
dative to PRO. However, because for him the infinitive is embedded within CP even
under OC, he needs to posit two types of C, one assigning dative, the other not. One
might think that this choice has something to do with the possibility of mixed judg-
ments, but Landau (2008: 898, fn. 17) instead states that the choice is free and that
mixed judgments arise whenever T/v is free either to probe C, as in (31), or to skip C
and probe PRO directly, as in (30). We will consider his implementation of variation
in Section 4, but suffice it to say that, if C is implicated in assigning the dative, a more
appealing idea than having two kinds of covert C might be that under OC there is no
C at all. That is, there is no reason why control structures should require a full CP.
Instead, clauses come in various sizes – for the sake of argumentation as in (32) – with
the subject introduced in [Spec,vP]:
(32) [CP ... C [TP ... T [vP PRO v [VP ... V ...]]]]
In keeping with Franks and Hornstein (1992) as well as with Babby’s VB, the dative
can only arise if the infinitival is ultimately contained within a CP.^15 I will argue that
the SD occurs in CPs, implying that all the constructions in (7) involve CPs rather than
smaller clausal projections. Moreover, in instances where there are two options, e.g.
Landau’s (14a–f ), one explanation will be that there are two competing structures, one
with CP and one without.
Finally, Landau’s highly mechanical account raises the same questions other
PRODAT systems do, about the nature of null Case and the relationship between dative
PRO and overt dative NPs. Landau (2008: 898) just stipulates that when “C is chosen
.... with case, which is fixed to be dat in Russian, ... [t]his case feature can only be
checked by PRO.”- Franks and Hornstein show, for example, that the SD is not only unavailable in OC
infinitivals (which are bare TPs), but that it also cannot appear in infinitival complements to
participles or gerunds (which are even smaller, vP or VP).