Early Inflected Infinitives and Late V-to-C Movement

In this paper we have provided results regarding child production data showing that: (i) inflected infinitives are productive in child European Portuguese/EP as early as the age of 1;11 - in most of these cases inflected infinitives are unambiguously identified only by an overt subject, although some unambiguous cases also bear overt inflection; (ii) almost all inflected infinitives produced at this early stage are already used in expected structures. However, 98% of inflected infinitives produced in expected contexts in the early child EP data we analyzed here are restricted to para ‘for’ purpose clauses.