Preverbal subjects in null subject languages are not necessarily dislocated

Abstract

In recent work on null subject languages it has been claimed that preverbal subjects are always (clitic-)left dislocated. In this paper, we argue against this claim, on the grounds of empirical evidence from European Portuguese concerning agreement facts, asymmetries between preverbal subjects and clitic-left dislocated XPs with respect to minimality effects, the existence of languages with a mixed system (null expletive subjects and full referential ones), language acquisition data, the behavior of negative QPs and interpretation facts, and propose a non-uniform analysis of preverbal subjects and clitic-left dislocated XPs that derives their topic interpretation from a predication rule stated configurationally (section 2). Our account of the SVO and VSO orders displayed in European Portuguese relies on a specific formulation of the EPP parameter, on the locality constraint Attract Closest X and on the independently motivated claim that V-movement targets T in European Portuguese (section 3). Under our analysis, the computational system generates equally economical SVO and VSO derivations and discourse considerations, at the appropriate interface, rule out the unfelicitous ones.

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 — 29 citations exist upstream.

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