Resumen de Raising to object in wager/assure-class verbs: a pf account of the defective paradigm

Yuri Ito

• 'Wager'-class and 'assure'-class verbs exhibit a peculiarly defective paradigm where they allow ECM if the element undergoing ECM is an A′-trace but not if the element is fully lexical. This article offers new data that reveal parallelism of these verbs with regular ECM verbs. Specifically, it is shown (i) that in 'wager'-class verbs the ECM subject can remain in the embedded subject position and optionally raises to the Agreement projection of the embedding verb and (ii) that this raising to object is not possible with 'assure'-class verbs due to Minimality. Based on these observations, it is suggested that the defective paradigm exhibited by wager/assure-class verbs stems from a PF constraint rather than a syntactic Case-theoretic mechanism.