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

We argue that in certain reduced embedded clauses Voice behaves differently from most other contexts, on the basis of tough-constructions (TCs) and modal passives (MPs) in Catalan and Italian. These constructions involve an A-dependency targeting only internal arguments of morphologically active transitive infinitives (unlike control, raising, and restructuring dependencies) because they involve a C/I-less VoiceP complement with a defective Voice layer (no accusative, no passive morphology, passive-like implicit agent). Thanks to the existence of a resumptive variant of TCs/MPs in Catalan, we propose a way to derive the distribution of defective Voice, which must be directly selected by a suitable lexical category, with regard to active/passive Voice, which must be directly selected by a functional head (at least in the languages at issue). Our findings bear on the broader theoretical debates about the typologies of Voice, clausal complements, and on the syntactic correlates of clause size.