Help an amateur?

[Josh Epstein]

Hi, I am a student at the Univ. of Puget Sound, which doesn't have a
linguistics dept., and I am pursuing independent study in GB theory (which I
gather many people round here don't like much, and I'm not sure I do
either). I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts or advice on a couple of
questions for an unabashed, but well-meaning, amateur. I would appreciate
it. These seem like such basic questions that I'm sort of embarrassed to ask
them, but I'd love some thoughts or advice.

1. Is PRO-drop related to the form of commands? When we say "Pass the
butter" (as opposed to "You pass the butter," or "Will you pass the
butter"--itself a transformation--)is this a form of PRO-drop?)

2. PRO is ungoverned, meaning that a sentence like *John wants for PRO to go
the mall

is ungrammatical (forgive the uncomely example). So what about archaic
sentences like:

I went down South for PRO to see my gal

or

Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende, the holy blisful martir for PRO to
seke.

One argument I suppose is that the complementizer "for" here is just padding
the meter, in either case, but I find that unconvincing. It doesn't seem
unlikely to me that either of these would be "natural speech"; even a
cursory keyword search on google finds several of these occurrences.

I hope these questions aren't a.) too basic or b.) too arcane. I'm curious
to see what people think. Thanks.

Josh
jepstein at ups.edu