Stories about oneselfi read nicely ECi.
ماهية أفعال المطاوعة وسلوكها النحوي - (ج 1 / ص 10)
(17) a.*The report was written IMPi without PROi due care.
b. They expected PROi to write the report without PROi due care.
When we test the middles in (9) against Roberts's three properties, we are led to believe that the empty argument in middles functions like PRO. Consider the following data, some of which repeated here for convenience, where, as we have seen, middles permit their empty arguments to license anaphors.
(18) a. Stories about oneselfi read nicely ECi.
b.It seems that [today's news about oneselfi] always reads better than yesterday's ECi.
c. Some poems read better aloud to oneselfi than others do ECi.
Under a DP-analysis like (11), which would treat PRO as the antecedent for the anaphor in (18a), an EC would still be a prerequisite to making the presence of anaphors licit in (18b). Moreover, a DP-analysis cannot account for the anaphor in (18c), which is not contained within the DP. (18c) suggests that not only can middles have nonovert arguments -i.e. arguments whose function is to bind the anaphors - but also that these arguments must be PROs, rather than IMPs, because they do not bind the anaphors.
Roberts's second property, which assumes that PROs can be controlled, lends support to the claim that the EC in middles is PRO. Take the following examples:
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Point of Impact
