The Emergence of the Infinitival Left Periphery

The languages of the world differ with respect as to whether they allow for wh-infinitives and infinitival relative clauses. No systematic analysis has been proposed so far for this language variation. In this talk, I postulate the Wh-Infinitive-Correlation that links the (non-) availability of wh-infinitives and infinitival relatives to morphological properties of the infinitival C-system. It is shown that wh-infinitives as well as infinitival relatives are impossible in languages in which the left periphery of the infinitive cannot be occupied with an infinitival complementizer, an infinitival marker, or more generally, with a base-generated phonetically realized element. In contrast, languages with wh-infinitives do exhibit non-finite complementizers. The discussion is mostly based on Romance and Germanic languages. A close connection exists between the absence of overt subordinators in the infinitival C-system and the possibility of interrogative and relative clause formation with infinitives: languages which do not have phonetically realized complementizers with certain infinitives do not allow for infinitival questions and relative clauses with these infinitives. Consider, for example, the status of the infinitival marker to in English, zu in German, and te in Dutch. It has been claimed in the literature that infinitives in Indo-European languages have developed from verbal nouns (see Lightfoot 1979, Kageyama 1992, Nunes 1995, Jarad 1997, among others). As a verbal noun, the infinitive was governed by a preposition, for example, by the preposition to i