Defective Voice in Italian tough-constructions

This paper addresses two main syntactic issues posed by Italian tough-constructions (TCs), which, unlike English TCs, are an A-dependency: (i) TCs can only extract the object of a transitive verb, without passivisation of the infinitive; (ii) TCs are monoclausal configurations. Building on Bryant et al. (2023), I propose that tough-adjectives can select a defective Voice head (VoiceR), unable to assign accusative and introducing an external argument as an unvalued feature (cf. long passives). Furthermore, I show that VoiceR is only available in extremely reduced verbal complements, as it must be directly selected by the embedding predicate.