Subject / Verb versus Verb / Subject Orders

(CLLD) and left dislocation (LD) structures. Therefore, the analysis of preverbal subjects in Spanish will be based on adjunction rather than on movement procedures. For pre-verbal subjects in English, we will take a movement approach.

Post-verbal subjects in Spanish are related to movement procedures, both in the case of neutral and marked subjects.

Regardless of the different options available in any of these three languages, it is a fact that we are always dealing with what has traditionally been termed SVO-type languages.

Uribe-Etxebarría (1992) points out that in Spanish a quantified subject in postverbal position may have either a wide or a narrow scope, as in (70); but when we are dealing with a preverbal subject, it can only have narrow scope, as in (71):

(70) ¿a quién dices que amaba cada senador? narrow or wide scope; ambiguity [to whom say-2^ndps that love-3^rdps-past each senatorsubject]

(71) ¿a quién dices que cada senador amaba? narrow scope; no ambiguity [to whom say-2^ndps that each senator love-3^rdps-past]

In (70), if the subject has wide scope, the sentence will be interpreted as follows:

every senator can love a different person, the one each senator chooses to love. In (71), the subject can only have narrow scope and so the sentence can be rephrased as follows: all senators love the same person. This option, with the subject having narrow scope, can also apply to the postverbal subject in (71).

English subjects are always preverbal. As May (1985) shows, and as opposed to the Spanish example in (71), English preverbal subjects can have either narrow or wide scope, as in (72):

(72) whom do you say that every senator loved?

167

Comparing the previous Spanish examples to the English ones in (73), we arrive at an interesting parallelism:¹⁶⁴

(73) a. someone thinks that Mary solved every problem b. someone thinks that every problem Mary solved

The example in (73a) reveals an SVO order in the subordinate clause. In this case the direct object every problem can either have a narrow or a wide scope. In (73b), the topicalization of the object applies in the subordinate clause and thus the object is located before the subject. Here there is no ambiguity in every problem which can only have narrow scope; that is, the sentence is interpreted as follows: Mary solved all problems. Even if in (73) we are dealing with the subject preceding or following the direct object (rather than the verb as in (70) and (71)), preverbal subjects in Spanish and topicalization in English have some common properties (i.e.

restriction to only narrow scope) and are in a way analogous processes. This implies that, preverbal subjects in Spanish and in English should be treated differently.

In an attempt to capture the differences between English and Spanish, Contreras (1991) defends a different type of analysis for the subject position in SVO orders. In the case of English, the subject must raise to [Spec IP] for Case assignment, thus rendering the unmarked order in (74):

164 Examples taken from Lasnik and Uriagereka (1988).

IP

I’

VP

V’

V I

NP*

(74)

168

In the case of Spanish, which is represented in the tree diagram in (75), SVO order is the result of adjunction (as opposed to SVO in English), since Spanish lacks [Spec IP] position:

Contreras (1991) suggests that economy principles prevent IP from projecting a specifier position. In his analysis, subjects in Spanish are assigned Case and agreement under c-command by inflection, which is taken to be lexical and, as such, is able to L-mark a postverbal (c-commanded) subject. Given this perspective, there is no justification for the projection of a specifier position of IP.

Preverbal subjects are generated as adjuncts, and Case and agreement are presumably assigned postverbally to a null pro when no overt subject appears.

Depending on the cases, this adjunction of the subject would be carried out either by movement, as in (76):

V’

V IP

IP

I VP NP*

I’

(75)

(76)

IP IP

I VP NPi*

I’

[IP [VP sabe María la lección]] [know-3^rdps Mary the lesson]

[IP Maríai [IP sabek [VP ti [V’ tk la lección]]]]

or by base generation (no movement being involved in this case), as in (77):

Notice that in any case, both in Spanish and in English, Contreras' (1991) and Zagona's (1982) VP-internal subject hypothesis applies.

Since the subject is placed in IP via adjunction, Spanish VS orders (either VOS or VSO) result therefore from V-to-I movement applied to D-structure; no subject postponing applies. It is rather the verb that moves past the position in which the subject is placed. Here Contreras (1991) follows the proposals by Emonds (1976) and Pollock (1989) according to which V-to-I movement occurs with all verbs in Spanish and French but only with have and be in English.

Taking these previous proposals as the starting point, minimalist approaches to this topic have also accounted for subjects and their order in the sentence.

(77)

IP IP

I VP NP*

I’

V’

V

[IP no sé [CP cómo se puede saber [CP cuánto ganan esos futbolistas]]]

[IP esos futbolistasi [IP no sé [CP cómo se puede saber [CP cuánto ganan proi]]]]

[these football players I don’t know how one can know how much they make]

Olarrea (1996), based on the above-mentioned work by Contreras (1991), considers preverbal subjects as instances of clitic left-dislocation (in the sense of Cinque 1990). This means that in these cases we are not dealing with movement operations but rather with processes of adjunction. As proposed by Chomsky (1993), the phenomena of agreement and nominative Case in Spanish are manifestations of a structural relation between a functional head and its specifier position. The nominal categorial features of AgrS in Spanish are, following Olarrea (1996), uniformly [-strong] while the verbal categorial features of this inflectional head are [+strong], a characteristic of null-subject languages.¹⁶⁵ It is then a distinction between the different features contained in AgrS, those that are nominal (which are [-strong]), and those that are verbal (which are, as in any null-subject language, [+strong]).

Agreement features, therefore, are going to be the connecting point in the present analysis. But, at the same time, we will need to go beyond the [+/- strong]

agreement feature dichotomy in order to provide a unified account of both English and Spanish which includes both their universal features and their peculiarities.

We will focus first on preverbal subjects and then on postverbal subjects.