Causative Constructions In Old And Classical Portuguese: Scrambling And The Emergence Of Exceptional Case Marking

This text has a twofold goal: to give a picture of variation and change involving different causative constructions in Old and Classical Portuguese from a corpus-based study, and to present an account for the emergence of the Exceptional Case Marking construction in the complement of causative verbs. I propose, in a minimalist framework, that the licensing of the causee in the position between the causative and the infinitival verb arises from the reanalysis of an A' position at the periphery of the infinitival phrase, resulting from a scrambling operation. Until the end of Old Portuguese the construction would not be possible due to a correlation between the property of "free word order" regarding discourse configurationality and the inverse morphosyntactic alignment of the verbal arguments in the infinitival complement.23175