The romance causee as an oblique subject

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide an analysis of the a-causee found in Romance periphrastic causatives (Rouveret and Vergnaud 1981; Kayne 1975; Burzio 1986; Guasti 1993; Folli and Harley 2007 a.o.). We propose that the a-causee should be seen as a quirky subject, which receives dative, i.e. oblique case, by means of an elementary predicate lexicalized by the preposition a (Manzini and Franco 2016). The crucial observation is that, independently of causatives, crosslinguistically oblique subjects show up in structurally reduced sentences crucially lacking the TP layer (e.g. perfective sentences in split ergative languages cf. Georgian discussed by Nash 2014 a.o.). The lacking of the TP layer makes nominative case unavailable and this is why in functionally impoverished syntactic environments subjects get oblique case i.e. they are realized as non-nominative quirky subjects.