The non - omission of nonfinite be ∗

What makes be omissions possible? An obvious candidate answer that has long been entertained is simply this: be is semantically empty, hence a good choice to omit under performance-related pressures (cf. Brown & Fraser 1963). This would make beomission expected in all child languages. What would this hypothesis lead us to expect about the infinitive form of be? In terms of semantic vacuity, nonfinite be is an even better choice for omission than finite be, since it does not carry tense or agreement information (as noted by Brown 1973)—most such deletions would be completely recoverable, as can be seen in (2), which consists of invented examples illustrating a range of relevant environments.