By Juan Uriagereka
This paper explores two simple, related ideas, within the Minimalist Program: that the skeletal Tense system of clauses involves a single T node, whether they are finite or infinitive, of the raising or the control type; and that this system is implicated in the personal system. A rich, complete T node’ assigns’ full Case, where a poor, partial T’ assigns ~ null Case, again whether this manifests itself in control or raising constructions. I think of this Case distribution as ‘personal’ in that categories with a complete system of features that includes personal ones ‘checks’ full Case, where as categories with a partial system, one without personal features, ‘checks’ only null Case.
In other words, there is a correlation between complete Tense in the inflectional skeleton, a complete set of checking features in its dependents, and full Case (correspondingly, partial Tense, a partial set of checking features, and null Case). Although I depart from his particular implementation, this paper owes much to the interesting discussion of Case and person specifications in Ormazabal (1999).