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The continuum of control plays a crucial role in the marking of transitivity in Latin, witnessed also by the alternation between the personal and impersonal encoding of eventualities. The present study investigates argument marking with some ‘impersonal’ verbs. These patterns reflect the crystallisation of a seemingly widespread construction in the early stages of the language, probably of Indo-European inheritance, the use of the third-person singular active with an accusative/oblique argument to denote the spontaneous manifestation of an eventuality and the lack of control of the A/S argument, a pattern competing with the passive form for some verbs in this domain. These impersonal constructions in Latin point to the existence of a dependent-marked, agentive-coding subsystem, similar to analogous constructions in languages with semantic alignment. This evidence suggests that Latin is a language with a syntactically based (nominative–accusative) and (dependent-marked) semantically based subsystems of alignment, sensitive to the notion of control.

The chapter examines the syntactic behaviour of a special class of non-canonical subjects, namely nominal infinitives, in Latin and in one of its daughter languages, Old Italian. The data show that Latin infinitives can appear in subject function only if the finite verb of the clause belongs to a restricted set of unaccusative predicates, corresponding to states or telic changes of state. In other words, Latin infinitives cannot surface as subjects of unergative and transitive predicates, thus conforming to a widespread cross-linguistic trend concerning non-canonical subjects. Vice versa, the distribution of subject infinitives in Old Italian is unrestricted, insofar as they are eligible to subjecthood regardless of the finite verb of the clause. The hypothesis this chapter explores is that the change which took place from Latin to Old Italian, involving the syntactic status of nominal infinitives, might have started from the clauses with a finite experiencer predicate.