36 Steven Franks
Finally, in previous work I basically denied the existence of variation, at least with
respect to Object Control, arguing (along with others) that the agreement possibility
under obligatory Object Control was actually a matter of floating off the semipredica-
tive. Franks (1995) did however point out the problems posed by variation in case
transmission for Polish żeby ‘in order to’ and Russian V + N collocations.4.3 Avoiding overgeneration
I now return to the question of how the approaches (would) treat the look-ahead puz-
zle introduced by bottom-up syntax (bearing in mind that not all of these approaches
were formulated in bottom-up terms). After examining the issue, I suggest an approach
which combines elements of each.
We saw that in Babby’s (2009) InfP system the difference between agreement
and the SD reduces to whether there happens to be a PRODAT in [Spec,InfP]. It is the
PRODAT possibility that creates the overgeneration problem, since once InfP is postu-
lated, there is no obvious way to prevent it from having a filled specifier, circumvent-
ing further V-binding and leading, in turn, to the SD. To be fair, Babby (2009: 185–6)
notices this problem and suggests the following principle: “An infinitive s-predicate
complement is used whenever V-binding is possible; when it isn’t, an infinitive s-clause
complement is used instead.” While this expresses precisely the correct generalization,
it does not derive from anything in his model. Babby notes that “it remains to be seen
whether this principle can be shown to be a special case of a more abstract, universal syn-
tactic principle.” But an explanation was already implicit in his 1998 version. The only
difference between the two types of infinitivals in 2009 was whether PRODAT merges
in [Spec,InfP] or not, but in 1998 there were two distinct categories, VP and S. This
gives us an immediate handle on a possible principled solution to the overgeneration
and look-ahead problems, i.e. to project an S only when VB fails with VP. An updated
instantiation of this idea will be described at the end of this section.
With respect to MTC approaches it is difficult to say much about overgeneration,
since Grebenyova (2005) puts the SD aside. However, my assumption is that there
would be a silent dative PRO/pro subject of the infinitive only when a lexical/overt
subject is not viable. This is presumably a matter of whether movement from subject
position is going to succeed or not. Of course, knowing whether or not something is
going to be in an island involves look-ahead, which as noted is a persistent problem for
bottom-up approaches. On the other hand, if [Spec,TP] is occupied by PRO/pro when
TP merges with C, but lexical when TP merges with V, the solution to look-ahead for
MTC approaches may reduce to minimizing projection, as under VB. Equally prob-
lematic is the possibility of SD under Object Control, as in (7a), repeated in (36):^19- Moreover, as noted above, agreeing accusative is an increasingly viable option in (36).