Tanja Schmid

IPP constructions pose a longstanding problem for syntactic theory: An unexpected form (the infinitive) shows up in certain constructions where the past participle would be expected. I shall argue that !PP constructions can be analysed in an optimality theoretic framework (Prince & Smolensky 1993, for syntax see e.g. Grimshaw 1997) as a kind of last resort strategy. Not only cases of obligatory and impossible IPP but also cases of optional IPP can be accounted for crosslinguistically by the optimality theoretic interaction of faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints. mehr