Diachronic Syntax

Resumo: O objetivo principal do presente texto é propor uma análise para as construções ditransitivas do português brasileiro (PB), com verbos de transferência/movimento e verbos de criação, cujo objeto preposicionado é introduzido pelas preposições " a " ou " para ". Ao longo do artigo, demonstrarei que as preposições introdutoras de objetos indiretos (OIs) em PB possuem obrigatoriamente um conteúdo semântico. Portanto, diferentemente do português europeu (PE), a variante brasileira não faz parte das línguas que possuem alternância dativa (cf. Larson 1988, Marantz 1993, Pylkkänen 2002), pois a mesma não apresenta núcleo aplicativo em seu inventário de projeções funcionais. Logo, minha hipótese é que as construções ditransitivas do PB apresentam um núcleo funcional PP como parte da estrutura interna do seu sintagma preposicional.
Abstract: The main focus of this paper is to propose an approach to ditransitive constructions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) with dynamic verbs of transfer and movement as well as creation verbs. In BP, the indirect objects (IOs) that accompany these verbs can be introduced by two distinct prepositions: " a " and " para ". Throughout this text, I will demonstrate that these prepositions have a lexical interpretation in BP. Therefore, differently from European Portuguese (EP), the Brazilian variety does not participate in the dative alternation (cf. Larson 1988, Marantz 1993, Pylkkänen 2002), as it does not have applicative heads in its argument structure. Thus, I assume that the ditransitive sentences in BP have a pP head as part of the internal structure of its prepositional phrase.

Recent work in grammaticalization has highlighted cases where former inflectional affixes have gained independence on an unexpected path towards clitic or full-word status. Such cases challenge the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization at the formal level (word > clitic > affix). This article examines such developments, citing new evidence from the development of the person–number inflection of the conditional auxiliary in Slavonic. In some varieties, this comes to be identified with an existing clitic, the present tense of the perfect auxiliary ‘be’. This development is reminiscent of other cases where obsolescent morphology is reassigned to productive functions and which can best be treated as instances of exaptation–adaptation, a process which lacks directionality and frequently leads to counterdirectional change.

New comparative data concerning the distribution of V1 and V3 orders in the Medieval Romance languages is presented in order to propose an analysis of the role these ‘deviant’ orders play in Verb Second (V2) grammars. It is proposed that neither V1 nor V3 orders are
incompatible with a V2 grammar and that the synchronic variation found with regard to the licensing of V1 and V3 in Romance and cross-linguistically is linked to whether the locus of the V2 property is either ‘low’ in the C-domain on Fin or ‘high’ on Force.

The paper surveys the state of research of Hebrew syntax from approximately the mid-20th century onward. It indicates the themes which have already received the attention of scholars to varying extents and points out areas of research which deserve the attention of scholars in the future. Among the topics discussed are the syntactic roles of word classes; the main syntactic functions, viz. subject, predicate, object, attribute, and adverbial; syntactic relations, viz. the predicative relation, the attributive relation, and the object/adverbial relation; verb government and valency; grammatical agreement; annexation; clause patterns, parataxis and hypotaxis; verbal moods, copulas and auxiliary verbs, and negation.

This work focuses on a particular diachronic transformation of a syntactic category, that is the propositional negation. I consider a time span ranging from archaic Latin to modern Italian, passing through the ancient forms of medieval documents. I will show that some negative phenomena endured in different diachronic transformations, while others changed over time, confirming generalizations such as those formalized as espersen's cycle. rom this point of view, the change in the syntactic nature of the Latin negative morpheme n n was crucial: it started as a maximal pro ection and it became a head. This change caused the multiple negation constructions that still occur in Italian. inally, I will also discuss some negative phenomena occurring in odern Italian, which are not well studied.

Hybrid nouns, nouns which induce different agreements according to the target, have been described in various languages. The new question is why they exist at all. There is clear evidence that hybrids vary considerably in the agreement they control, even within a single language. It therefore seems logical to align this variability with lexical semantics, and this is convincing for some hybrids. But this motivation is hard to reconcile with the fact that some hybrids are hybrids only for part of their paradigm. These latter instances suggest that the underlying motivation for some hybrids is a form-meaning mismatch.

Dans cette étude, nous nous pencherons sur la recette de cuisine française du moyen âge. Notre corpus consiste en des recettes du 'Viandier' de Guillaume de Tirel, un manuscrit qui date de la fin du XIVe siècle. Premièrement, nous examinerons la ponctuation dans deux petites recettes. Nous décrirons l’emploi des signes de ponctuation de l’époque et nous chercherons leurs équivalents actuels. Deuxièmement, nous décrirons quelques régularités syntaxiques de la phrase médiévale dans les mêmes recettes. Finalement, nous essayerons de formuler quelques hypothèses par rapport à l’emploi de l’article partitif à partir d’un corpus plus large. Ainsi, nous tenterons d’obtenir plus de clarté sur la langue française médiévale dans les recettes de cuisine.

The present paper provides a cognitive-grammaticalization analysis of the morpheme NA in Xhosa, discussing the categorial status of NA as a con-junctive coordinator (CC) and its range of polysemy and/or polyfunctionality. First, the study demonstrates that, when used in a coordinating function, NA approximates the CC prototype to a significant extent, as it complies with most of the features associated with CCs cross-linguistically. Second, the analysis of polysemy/polyfunctionality shows that NA spans large parts of the typological map posited for CC constructions. The conceptual and diachronic center of the map of NA corresponds to a prepositional comitative sense from which the other values (e.g. 'carry', possessive, temporal, modality, 'even', concessive, 'also, as well' and 'illness') and functions (e.g. predicative and adverbial) have emerged through a series of semantic extensions connected via family resemblance. In this map, the uses of NA as a nominal coordinator, comitative preposition, possessive predicator, and focal-adverbial 'also, as well' are the most prototypical. The results of the research contribute to the typological theory of CCs and their semantic-map modeling.*

Onde não chegaram os portugueses com as suas caravelas?
Desde Ceuta, em Marrocos, conquistada em 1415, ao Japão, alcançado por acaso em 1542 (por três mercadores de peles, Francisco Zeimoto, António da Mota e António Peixoto, que faziam rota para a China mas sofreram naufrágio até às costas da ilha Tanega Shima – só sete anos depois a Companhia de Jesus começará a sua obra de conversão por Francisco Xavier), ao longo de apenas dois séculos e meio Portugal tocou todos os oceanos e correu verdadeiramente as sete partidas do mundo.
A Época dos Descobrimentos e das Explorações, porém, depois do seu declínio (marcado pelo surgir das potências holandesa e inglesa) continuou a sobreviver nos chamados « novos continentes ». Não quero referir-me só aos vestígios materiais deixados pela presença lusitana nas terras colonizadas – instalações civis e de marinha, fortalezas, desembarques e portos, etc. –, mas sim a um imenso património cultural e sonoro: o das línguas recém-nascidas (com respeito aos séculos dos descobrimentos) de base portuguesa – os crioulos...

The current paper investigates the plausibility of the claim that the complementation patterns of an adjective can resemble that of a verb as well as its compliance with the rules of Present-Day English. The results of the research suggest that, as long noted in the case with verbs, the gerund complement is diff using over the to-infinitive in regressive contexts. The study also reveals additional factors which might influence a speaker's choice of the respective complement type.

This book examines second position effects in syntax, the V2 order in Germanic and second position cliticization in Slavic. These are unique syntactic mechanisms, which seem to be constrained only by the requirement that an element, a finite verb or a clitic, occurs after a category-neutral, clause-initial constituent, with few restrictions as to what this constituent might be. The main aim of this work is to establish a parametric property that triggers V2 and second position clitic placement. Both effects were hypothesized to be related phenomena already in their first analysis due to Wackernagel (1892), but so far they have not been examined in a comparative way in detail, especially in a diachronic perspective. This work shows that neither of them is a uniform syntactic operation, and it is necessary distinguish between Force-related and generalized second position placement. What unifies them is Tense dependency: V2 structures are restricted to tensed environments, whereas the development of second position cliticization in Slavic is shown to have been contemporaneous with the decline of morphological tense marking on the verb, analyzed as the loss of TP.
The book can be ordered from the publisher:  http://ebooki.wuwr.pl/category/628 (e-book, pdf format); http://www.wuwr.com.pl/products/1855.html (paper version)

Chapter 6 (by Santazilia) is a study of the Basque noun morphology, which sets out the noun paradigm of historical Basque and the structure of its NP, and then goes on to list the explanations proposed so far for every aspect concerning the formation of that paradigm: first the number/definiteness axis, and then the individual cases, classifying these into primary cases (grammatical and local), secondary cases (those built upon the allative and the genitive), and pseudo-flectional morphemes or non-cases.

An understudied morphosyntactic innovation, reanalysis of the Proto-Austronesian (PAn) stative intransitive prefix *ma- as a transitive affix, offers new insights into Austronesian higher-order subgrouping. While Malayo-Polynesian is currently considered an Austronesian primary branch with no identifiably closer relationship with any linguistic subgroup in the homeland (Blust 1999, 2013; Ross 2005), the fact it displays the same innovative use of ma- with Amis, Siraya, Kavalan, and Basay-Trobiawan and shares the merger of PAn *C/t with this group suggests that Malayo-Polynesian and East Formosan may share a common origin – the subgroup that comprises the four languages noted above. This observation points to a renewed subgrouping more consistent with a socio-historical picture where the out-of-Taiwan population descended from a seafaring community expanding to the Batanes and Luzon after having developed a seafaring tradition. It also aligns with recent findings in archaeology and genetics that (i) eastern Taiwan is most likely the starting point of Austronesian dispersal (Hung 2005, 2008, 2019; Bellwood 2017; Bell- wood & Dizon 2008; Carson & Hung 2018) and (ii) the Amis bear a significantly closer relationship with Austronesian communities outside Taiwan (Capelli et al. 2001; Trejaut et al. 2005; McColl et al. 2018; Pugach et. al. 2021; Tatte et. al. 2021). Future investi- gation of more shared innovations between Malayo-Polynesian and East Formosan could shed further light on their interrelation.

This article discusses two case studies of diachronic "voice flipping" in which the syntax of a participle appears to change from active or "subject-oriented" to passive (Ancient Greek-menos to Modern Greek-menos) and from resultative/stative to active (Proto-Indo-European *-nt-; Hittite-ant-vs. Ancient Greek-nt-). While the first type of change is the result of a diachronic reanalysis by which a functional projection (VoiceP) is lost, the second type adds an active Voice head. Both changes are the result of the simultaneous availability of a stative and an eventive reading in deverbal adjectival forms and could belong to a larger "participle cycle". However, unlike in other changes usually discussed under the label "cycle", unidirectional economy principles do not apply in these cases. Rather, they provide evidence that some types of morphosyntactic change, especially those related to event and argument structure, are driven by reanalysis of the feature content of functional heads under local structural ambiguity.

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive description of Hittite clause structure. The picture that emerges is quite different from both the view of Hittite clause architecture as codified in (Hoffner, Melchert 2008) and as documented in the parallel line of research (Luraghi 1990; 2012; forthcoming).
The paper focuses on two key features of Hittite clause architecture: (a) preverbal vs clause initial vs clause second positions; (b) verb’s positions in the clause, although in-depth study of these aspects involves examination of virtually every significant feature of Hittite syntax.
Preverbal position is constituted by wh-words, subordinators, negation markers, negative, indefinite and relative pronouns as well as some adverbs, only part of these constituents can alternatively be clause initial or second. Contrastive focus is normally preverbal, contrastive topic is clause initial. Two focus positions are distinguished in a Hittite clause – high (subjects and objects) and low (adverbs, adverbials). Wh-words, subordinators and relative / indefinite pronouns can also be optionally postverbal. It is significant that only lower focus can be postverbal, never high focus, even though in the canonical word order both high and low focus is preverbal. No information structure difference is detectible between the preverbal and postverbal positions.
It is shown that non-canonical positions of the verb can be described by two movements to the left from the canonical clause final position: (a) to the clause internal position which follows subject and object, both topical and focal, on the one hand, and precedes what is in the canonical word order the preverbal position5, on the other, producing V-wh/Neg/Rel, S-O-V- wh/Neg/Rel word orders; (b) to the clause leftmost position, producing V-S-O word order. *V- wh/Neg/Rel-S-O or *wh/Neg/Rel-V-S-O word orders are not attested in my ‘diplomatic’ corpus.
The last point raises an important question of sociolinguistics of the Hittite language, namely evidence for (idio)lects.

This working paper provides a novel contribution to the old question of the origin of the Indo-European (IE) feminine gender. It is a concise outline of the hypothesis that it developed from optional "collective" group-classifying classification within the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) noun phrase.

This dissertation investigates the evidence for verb movement at the earliest stages of the Germanic languages. It is argued that already in the oldest documents of Germanic there are cases which must involve movement of the finite verb from the Verb Phrase to a functional head position higher up in the hierarchical structure. In a well-defined set of cases this is the Complementizer (C) position, but in other cases an IP-internal functional head position seems more likely as a landing-site for the verb. Moreover, it is argued that whereas in Gothic and Old English the verb does not move to C when complements are topicalized, in the other old Germanic languages, Old Norse, Old High German, and Old Saxon, V–to–C movement is obligatory in topicalizations. An examination of the runic inscriptions reveals that topicalized complements triggered movement of the verb to C already at the earliest stage in the northern part of the Germanic linguistic area.

The article aims to describe the interplay between the linguistic use and the literary/academic norm regarding the agreement of the subject when expressed by a quantitative binominal phrase, where the second nominal is a plural noun, and the first nominal is a quantifying partitive noun (quarter, half, part, majority), a collective noun (bunch, lot, group), or a quantifier (number, pair, series). The description is diachronic and follows both the linguistic use as seen in Old Romanian texts and various other studies for the Modern Romanian and the formation of the academic norm beginning from the first grammars of Romanian until the most recent studies. The conclusion of our research is that the linguistic norm/use favours the agreement in the plural with the second nominal, with a slight exception during the second half of the 20th century, when the agreement in the singular gained momentum as a result of the literary norm becoming stricter in this respect and accepting only the formal agreement in the singular with the first nominal, relegating the agreement in the plural with the second nominal (semantic agreement) to the category of deviations from the norm. However, some older and latest studies indicate that the agreement in the plural is correct not only on the semantic level, but also on the formal level.

Classical Armenian displays a curious type of subordinate clause formation characterized by the addition of a cliticized anaphoric pronoun to the end of the first constituent within the subordinate clause. Meillet (1897-1898) first proposed that this process was an instance of Wackernagel's Law, which encompasses a range of syntactic secondposition phenomena in the world's languages. In this paper I survey the distribution of Wackernagel clauses in Armenian, and provide an account for their behavior within the framework of current syntactic theory. More specifically, I show that the constraints on what elements may serve as host for the clitic and where the finite verb and adverbs in the subordinate clause may surface follow naturally from independently motivated principles of recent generative syntactic theory.

The book starts with an overview of the diachronic variation in domain of word order as witnessed by the passage from Old to Modern Romanian. The most spectacular changes - dealt with in the remainder of the book - took place in the structure of clause and mostly concern the level of verb movement and the grammaticalization of functional elements.

Lan honetan Erdi Aroko euskararen kanpoko eta barneko historia laburra aurkezten dugu. Kanpoko historiari dagokionez, orduan euskarak zukeen hedaduraz, elebitasun egoeraz eta bestelako gaiez dihardugu. Barne historiari dagokionez, Erdi Aroko euskarak zituen ezaugarri fonologiko, morfologiko eta sintaktikoak azalduko ditugu. Amaieran  ondorio gisa Erdi Aroko euskararen periodizazio zirriborro bat aurkeztuko dugu.

Chapter 5 of the thesis, in French. Tense and aspect.  Basic aspect oppositions. Different kinds of resultative aspect forms. Aoristic shift. The IE perfect. Resultative periphrases and their grammaticalization.  Expression of the agent. Evidential. Resultative and diatheses.

In the present paper, we argue against the compound character of the subordinating element ca (…) să. After bringing both synchronic and diachronic evidence that să cannot be assigned conjunctional status, but rather can be viewed as an affix, belonging to the verbal complex together with other affixes (negation, certain adverbs and clitics), we conclude that in Romanian there is only a simple conjunction ca followed immediately or at a distance by a subjunctive, confirming thus linguistic ideas dating back to as early as Cipariu (1855). The optional or ungrammatical character of ca when immediately followed by subjunctive (să + verb) can be traced back to a commonly used structure in Latin and early Romance, namely conjunctionless subjunctive after certain types of verbs.

The reader is presented here with a fundamentally new reconstruction of the system of the Proto-Indo-European verb inflection. It is argued that the parent language of all Indo-European languages exhibited direct vs. inverse vs. intransitive verb forms and thus a direct vs. inverse system. This article provides an initial detailed reconstruction of the system of transitivity marking. The presented model deviates from the traditional model in that it is typologically different and based on a combinatorial methodology: The established results of Indo-European comparison are evaluated by means of a typology-based linguistic analysis and are grounded on typological patterns. This article is a fully revised version of a manuscript that was pre-published in the year 2017 on my profile at www.academia.edu. It is part of work in progress on a new comparative grammar of Proto-Indo-European.

Keywords: Reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European verb inflection; voice and transitivity; direction and verbal deixis; direct/inverse system

This volume is about the morphosyntactic encoding of feelings and emotions in Latin. It offers a corpus-based investigation of the Latin data, benefiting from insights of the functional and typological approach to language. Chiara Fedriani describes a patterned variation in Latin Experiential constructions, also revisiting the so-called impersonal constructions, and shows how and why such a variation is at the root of diachronic change. The data discussed in this book also show that Latin constitutes an interesting stage within a broader diachronic development, since it retains some ancient Indo-European features that gradually disappeared and went lost in the Romance languages.

This paper deals with the Church Slavonic translation of a medieval Latin compilation, Bruno’s commented Psalter (11th century), which was done in Novgorod, around the middle of the 16th century, by the well-known translator Dmitrij Gerasimov.
Some infinitive and participial constructions of the Slavonic text are here discussed and briefly compared with previous and later Church Slavonic translations from Latin. The aim is to put forward some syntactic features of the Slavonic text, which sometimes oscillates between the preservation of constructions inherited from the Church Slavonic tradition and the need of rendering in an appropriate way some peculiarities of Latin morpho-syntax. In the translation of the commentary on the Psalms one observes an increasing use of Accusativus-cuminfinitivo and participial constructions, due to the influence of the Latin model. This redistribution, or extension, of old patterns shows the particular nature of Church Slavonic syntax: at the outset departing from the local dialects, it became more flexible and permeable to syntactic calques (at the same time translation technique significantly moved toward literalism). Thus, although it was characterized by petrified forms and grammatical rules (or rather, textual fixed patters), Church Slavonic syntax still continued to experience changes and improvements due to the contact with external factors and or local dialects.
The collected material is intended as a first contribution to a broader typological investigation of syntactic constructions in Church Slavonic translations from Latin.

This paper surveys diachronic development of ergative alignment from accusative systems in a variety of languages such as Indo-Iranian, Carib, Kartvelian, Australian, Inuit, and Austronesian. I also consider how different origins and subsequent developments can lead to variation in ergative systems, including the differentiation between syntactic and morphological ergativity.

Macro-Jê is a major language family of Eastern South America. Historical-comparative studies of Macro-Jê are still incipient; in particular, there is no consensus regarding its exact composition in the scientific community. For this reason, it has been referred to as a “working hypothesis” (cf. RODRIGUES, 1999, p. 165) or even the “caput mortuum of South American linguistics” (RIVET, 1924, p. 697) in a number of earlier works. Thanks to recent advances in the documentation of Brazilian and Bolivian indigenous languages, we are now in position to reevaluate earlier claims on the relations between the languages that have been classified as Macro-Jê.
This Ph.D. dissertation aims to provide a reconstruction of aspects of the ancestral language of the Macro-Jê language family, including domains such as phonology, morphosyntax and lexicon. In addition to applying the traditional methods employed by historical-comparative linguistics, such as the comparative method and the internal reconstruction method, I make an attempt at reconstructing elements of Proto-Macro-Jê syntax within the Diachronic Construction Grammar framework. Throughout, I have adhered to bottom-up reconstruction principles with external control. For languages whose common origin could not be proven using the comparative method, probability judgments regarding their relation to Macro-Jê have been made through a tool known as preliminary lexicostatistics.
I conclude that the following language groups should be classified as Macro-Jê: Jê, Jaikó, Maxakalí, Krenák, Kamakã, Karajá, Ofayé, Rikbáktsa, and Jabutí; Chiquitano could be related to the aforementioned languages at a deeper level. Contrary to earlier claims by a number of authors, I exclude Boróro, Yaathê, Purí, Guató, Karirí, and Otí from the proposal, though a long-range genetic relationship may exist between Macro-Jê, Boróro, Karirí, and Tupian.
For Proto-Macro-Jê, I reconstruct the consonants */p, m, w, t, n, r, c, ñ, j, k, ŋ/ and the vowels */a, â, ə, ə̂, y, o, ô, u, e, ê, i, ə̃, ỹ, ũ, ẽ, ĩ/. Its maximal syllable structure is reconstructed as */CrVC°/, where /°/ stands for the so called echo vowel. Complex onsets could be formed exclusively by the combination of a peripheral (labial or velar) non-continuant and a rhotic: */pr, mr, kr, ŋr/.
Proto-Macro-Jê is reconstructed as head-final. A subclass of nouns (known as inflectable, or relational nouns), a subclass of intransitive verbs (known as descriptives), and the totality of transitive verbs and postpositions required their argument to be expressed immediately adjacent to the stem, to its left, either as a noun phrase or as a person index (one of *a- 2, *i- 3NCRF, *ta- 3CRF). I also reconstruct the morphophonological behavior of the */j/-initial stems, whose initial (thematic) consonant was elided upon the accretion of a person index; the person indices, in their turn, had allomorphs whose occurrence was restricted to the */j/-initial stems (*∅- 2, *c- 3NCRF, *t- 3CRF). A defective paradigm with no dedicated first person index can be reconstructed.
Finally, I tackle the reconstruction of the clause-level morphosyntax of the ancestral language of the Jê, Maxakalí, Krenák, and Kamakã families (“Proto-Eastern Macro-Jê”). I reconstruct four distinct constructions headed by verbs, or four clause types. Subordinate clauses displayed ergative-absolutive alignment, and were headed by verbs overtly marked as non-finite. Finite clauses (default pattern main clauses, imperative clauses, and coordinated clauses) displayed split intransitivity, whereby the only argument of monovalent predicates was encoded differently for each of the two subclasses of monovalent verbs. Imperative clauses diverged from the default pattern regarding the expression of their agentive argument (A/SA), obligatory in the default pattern and inhibited in imperative clauses. In the coordinated construction, consequent clauses were joined to the preceding clause through an element that tracked the identity of their subjects (nominative arguments, A/S), thus configuring a switch reference pattern. In the event of coreferent subjects, the conjunction *nẽc (~ -j, -ñ) ‘and (same subject)’ was used; in this case, the agentive argument of the consequent clause was not overtly expressed. Another strategy was deployed for expressing disjoint reference, whereby clauses were simply juxtaposed, with the consequent clause being introduced by an agentive pronoun, or connected through the element *mə̃ ‘and (different subject)’ (third person only).

La concordanza negativa è una strategia per esprimere la negazione di frase che si riscontra piuttosto frequentemente nelle lingue. Le dimensioni di variazione individuate dagli studi tipologici pongono interessanti interrogativi dal punto di vista della teoria sintattica, in particolare per quanto riguarda la distinzione tra concordanza negativa simmetrica e asimmetrica. Il presente contributo rappresenta una riflessione su questi temi attraverso l’esame dei dati del greco classico, che è caratterizzato da un sistema asimmetrico con interessanti
peculiarità rispetto a quelli maggiormente studiati. Sulla base di questi dati, si propone un’interpretazione originale dei fattori che determinano l’esistenza della concordanza negativa asimmetrica.

This thesis investigates the properties of Ancient Greek (AG) infinitival clauses and their subjects and how they can be accounted for within a generative framework. AG infinitives appear in many syntactic environments and they also have a variety of morphological forms, whose interpretation as temporal or aspectual is debatable. Moreover they license overt subjects in accusative case (Accusativus Cum Infinitivo-AcI) and they can also exhibit Control, where there is no accusative case detectable on the null subject and instead it appears with the case of its controller from the main clause (Case agreement across copula-CAAC). The main questions that this thesis addresses therefore are: (a) what licenses accusative, when accusative is present (instances of disjoint reference and emphasis, as well as non-controlled null subjects), (b) what disallows the availability of accusative in cases of control/CAAC and (c) whether this interchange relates to other properties of AG infinitival clauses, morphological/semantic or what. The analysis we will put forward goes against others in the literature, which reduce AcI to an instance of Exceptional Case marking (ECM) or relate it solely to the alleged temporal properties of the infinitives. Instead we argue for a series of things: (a) that all infinitival clauses are CPs, (b) that there is a split between two types of CPs however, based on their discourse properties: normal C*Ps, strong phases (in Chomsky’s, 2001 sense) that have a contrastive focus feature vs. CPs, weak phases that do not have this feature and consequently no discourse domain. The latter are instantiated as Control infinitives where there is also no availability of accusative for the infinitival subject. In order to relate the two properties we argue for the following: a morphologically rich non-finite T can value the Case of its subject. Whether it will actually do so depends on the existence and the feature content of the infinitival C: if C has a contrastive discourse feature, then it can consequently inherit the Case feature to non-finite T, which in turn can value the Case on the subject DP. If on the other hand, infinitival C does not have a discourse feature, then Case on the infinitival subject cannot be valued from within the infinitival clause and the latter is a weak phase, a domain transparent to operations from outside, where CAAC obtains. According to this analysis the EPP feature of non-finite clauses, when it exists, is related to discourse and it is neither a formal syntactic feature nor solely a PF feature. In the last part of this thesis we extend our analysis to other constructions that exhibit the interchange between overt subjects with case and null subjects with and without case as well as Control, namely Latin AcI, AG absolute participles and Modern Greek na clauses etc. We show that both in the finite and the non-finite domain, discourse features giving rise to two types of Cs, play a bigger role in syntactic operations than often assumed.