Toward a Cartography of Subject Positions

Abstract

Abstract His chapter aims to contribute to the current debate on clause structure by discussing the distribution of subjects. Starting from Chomsky (1981, 1986), the sentences in (1) have been assigned the basic clause structure in (2). The preverbal DP position accounts for the distribution of the thematic subject a man in (1a and b) and the expletive subject there in (le). In (le), the grammatical subject a man occupies the complement DP position of the unaccusative verb come: Since then, much work on subjects has shown that this view is too simplistic. A thematic, VP-internal subject position has been argued for also in the case of transitive and intransitive verbs (Koopman and Sportiche 1991, among many others), and a middlefield subject position, spent in a split left model, has been proposed to account for the intermediate placing of the subject in Transitive Expletive Constructions (TECs) in Icelandic (Bobaljik and Jonas 1996) (see (7a) below).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 445 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.