Basic English Grammar with Exercises

Chapter 8 - The Syntax of Non-Finite Clauses

difference between them is that hope can take a non-finite complement clause with a
complementiser, but believe cannot:

(11) a the bartender hoped [for the sheriff to stop the fight]
b *the bartender believed [for the sheriff to be a coward]

One assumption that might solve a number of problems might be that with believe
there is no CP, just an IP. This would account for the missing complementiser with
such verbs, it would also place the subject of the non-finite clause a little nearer to the
Case assigning light verb:

(12) vP

DP v'

the outlaws v VP

believe 1 -e IP V'

DP I' V

him I vP t 1

v'

v VP

to be on their trail

Recall from chapter 6 that the notion of government, which is relevant for Case
assignment, imposes a restriction on what can be governed in that an element can
govern ‘up to a point’. We left undefined what that point was in our previous
discussion, but now it is important to be more precise. There are a number of ways that
we might think of doing this, but one of the most intuitive is to suppose that certain
nodes in a tree form barriers to government in that they ‘protect’ their constituents
from government from the outside. Thus a governor may be able to govern up to a
barrier, but not through a barrier. We know that a light verb can assign Case to the
specifier of the VP, as this is the normal configuration in which accusative Case is
assigned:

(13) vP

v'

v VP

e DP V'

accusative