the role of tense and agreement in the licensing of subjects: evidence from participial clauses in bangla

this paper examines the subject-licensing properties of bangla non-finite participles. in this paper, i show that tense plays a pivotal role in explaining the distribution of subjects in participles. three participles, the imperfective participle, the perfective participle and the conditional participle, have been examined regarding their different choices of (c)overt subjects, and their compatibility with different types of control. following the ‘t-agr calculus’ of landau (2000, 2004), i show that tense unifies the different types of participles. clausal selection along with the presence of tense, also has a crucial role in the distribution of subjects across the participles. i suggest that tense is not only vital in licensing the subjects, but also pivotal for their compatibility with different types of predicates.