| Abstract (about 50 words): | The goal of the paper is to show that:
(i) the non-finite modal configurations are uniformly monoclausal (as shown by clitic climbing and negation raising, among other diagnostics);
(ii) in spite of the different morphosyntactic realization of the complements of the modal verb (bare short infinitive, participle, supine), they are structurally isomorphic, in the sense that the non-finite complement projects the same “amount” of syntactic structure, i.e. v-VoiceP;
(iii) the [modal verb + non finite complement] is a restructuring configuration, characterized by a series of adjacency effects; our analysis suggests that these restructuring effects actually fall out of minimality considerations (locality effects on verb movement). |