324 LAURA Α. MICHAELIS
c. Taedet me sermonis.
tires(IMPER) (A) sermon(G).
"Your story tires me."
d. Tui me miser et, mei
VOU(G) (A) makes-miserable(iMPER) me(G)
piget.
shames(IMPER)
"You make me miserable, I shame myself."
These, like the impersonal passives in (17), appear to be "subjectless" sen
tences. The non-accusative argument has neither the behavioral nor the
coding properties of a subject; it is genitive rather than nominative, and it
does not trigger verb agreement (the verb appears in third person form
regardless of the person and number of this argument).
There do appear to be cases, however, in which this genitive argument
functions like a subject, despite the fact that it lacks formal subject proper
ties. Such cases involve ideational verbs like arbitror ("I judge") and
demiror ("I marvel") and speech-act verbs like dico ("I say"), which require
clausal object complements containing accusative subjects and infinitival
predicates. An example of such an embedded clause can be seen in (20a).
This type of accusative-infinitive complement must be distinguished from
that of one-place epistemic predicates like constat ("is agreed") and man
ifestum est ("is obvious"), shown in (20b-c):
(20) a. Dixit ciceronem consulem esse.
(he)said ic( A) consul(A) be(INF)
"He said that Cicero to be consul."
b. Constat te bonum esse.
is-certain yOU(A) good(A) be(INF)
"It is certain that you are good."
Manifestum est nivem esse alb am.
obvious is snow(A) be(iNF) white(A)
"It is obvious that snow is white."
Such accusative-infintive complements as those in (20b-c) are readily
characterized as "a single [embedded] S-constituent on a par with a finite
clause," in Maraldi's terms (1983:168). According to Maraldi, such infiniti
val clauses have accusative subjects because they lack both INFL govern
ment and, via S' deletion, an immediately dominating S'. Yet while