This article revisits some core aspects of the syntax of the the Romance personal infinitive construction, reinterpreting and blending some key insights of the analyses of Mensching (2000) and Ledgeway (1998; 2000) to produce a novel hybrid analysis. In particular, the personal infinitive is argued to raise to the highest available position within the sentential core, albeit within a slightly pruned clause structure in which the highest TPs fail to project. Their failure to project entails, in turn, the absence of a canonical preverbal subject position, thereby accounting for the typical postverbal position of the subject in the personal infinitive construction and the restriction of preverbal subjects to nominal head categories (pronouns, proper names, kinship terms and bare quantifiers) which can exceptionally check the EPP by head-adjunction.