On the acceptability of agreeing infinitives in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

We examine the acceptability of agreeing infinitivals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using an offline Bi-modal Acceptability Judgment Task (B-AJT) based on Modesto (2018. Complement clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition (pp. 59–129). John Benjamins.), originally designed to test the Movement Theory of Control (MTC, e.g., Hornstein 1999. Linguistic Inquiry , 30, 69–96.). Following the MTC, subject raising and subject-control sentences are analyzed uniformly within a formal syntactic paradigm (e.g., Chomsky 1995. The minimalist program . MIT Press. et sequens ). Rodrigues and Hornstein (2013. Syntax , 16(3), 292–309.) argue that intuitions on agreeing infinitives in BP in Modesto (2018. Complement clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition (pp. 59–129). John Benjamins.) are inconclusive and not worthy of serious consideration, thus neutralizing a would-be challenge to the MTC. We examine acceptability data from BP speakers ( n = 52) living in the Southeastern US, which reveal a statistically significant difference ( p < 0.029) in the acceptability of partial control (PC, m = 1.68/4) and no-control (NC) sentences ( m = 2.26/4) with agreeing infinitives. We interpret this to be indicative of robust intuitions related to sentence structures with agreeing infinitives. The validity of such intuition data lends further credence to Merchant and Gupton (2025. Journal of Linguistics , 61(2), 301–337.), which reveals significant processing differences between control and raising structures, which is unexpected under the MTC account. Linear regression results reveal a correlation between geographic region and acceptability, highlighting the importance of geographic variation, which can reveal subtle microparametric differences within languages.