PRO, the EPP and Nominative Case: Evidence from Irish Infinitivals

Recent work in the Minimalist Program has made use of the Extended Projection Principle as a licensing feature for subject nominals explicitly separate from abstract nominative Case (Chomsky 1995). Both features are checked in Chomsky's system by the Tense head. Chomsky adopts the case system for licensing PRO proposed in Chomsky and Lasnik 1993, whereby PRO receives null case from an appropriate infinitival Tense head. This approach essentially maintains the intuition of the EST that the appearance of PRO is the result of a fact about the Case system. In this talk, we argue against this approach adopting instead the ideas of McCloskey 1996, who claims that the EPP and nominative Case are features checked by two distinct heads T and Agr respectively, which crucially can be separately active or inactive. Similar claims are found in Carnie (1995) and Harley (1995). In this paper we demonstrate that if the clausal architecture argued for by McCloskey is correct, we are forced to rework the standard account of the distribution of PRO. In particular, we draw the following three conclusions, in I: