The interaction between clause size and Voice: Evidence from Catalan and Italian

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.We argue that in certain reduced embedded clauses Voice behaves differently from ev-erywhere else, on the basis of tough-constructions (TCs) and modal passives (MPs) in Ital-ian and Catalan. These constructions involve an A-dependency targeting only internal ar-guments of morphologically active transitive infinitives (unlike control/raising/restructuringdependencies) because they involve a C/T-less VoiceP complement with a defective Voicehead (no accusative, no passive morphology, passive-like implicit agent). Thanks to theexistence of a resumptive variant of TCs/MPs in Catalan, we propose a way to derive thedistribution of defective Voice, which must be directly selected by a suitable lexical cat-egory, with regard to active/passive Voice, which must be directly selected by T (at leastin the languages at issue). Our findings bear on the broader theoretical debates about thetypologies of Voice, clausal complements, and on the syntactic correlates of clause size.