Pre and postverbal subject positions in Spanish: A minimalist account

• Main Author: Olarrea, Antonio Antxon
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1996
• Subjects: Language; Linguistics; Modern language
• ISBN: 9780591248098; 0591248093

In my dissertation I analyze the contrast between the pre and postverbal subject positions in Spanish declarative, interrogative and relative sentences under minimalist assumptions (Chomsky, 1995). There are three basic proposals that I defend in this dissertation: First, that Spanish preverbal subjects are Clitic Left Dislocated constructions, i.e. base-generated adjuncts to the maximal inflectional projection coindexed with an empty pronominal in argument position. As a result, sentences with preverbal subjects and sentences with postverbal subjects are analyzed as the result of different numerations. Parallely, I also claim that preverbal negative subjects, nonreferential quantifiers and contrastive focus phrases must occupy a different position from other preverbal constituents. Second, I claim that crosslinguistic evidence supports this analysis. The evidence comes from a study of Polysynthetic languages, other null-subject Romance languages and from a detailed analysis of Modern Standard Arabic. Third, I claim that subject positions in interrogtives and relatives can be accounted for if we assume that there is covert I-to-C movement in Spanish. I show that left- dislocated constituents block I-to-C movement and render preverbal subjects in interrogative constructions ungrammatical. Since this type of movement is not present in relative clauses, left-dislocated constituents are allowed. This hypothesis also predicts that Wh-elements that are base-generated in (Spec, CP) need not be licensed by covert I-to-C movement and therefore will allow the presence of preverbal subjects.