On the Position of Preposed PPs in English and Spanish

Abstract

O. Introduction Two ongoing and interconnected questions in Heles Contreras’ research program have been the interaction of syntactic and discursive factors in determining the order of elements in the clause and the syntactic characterization of subject position in, e.g., Spanish vs. English. In this paper I propose to show how a detailed examination of the nature of PP preposing in these two languages within the general postulates of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, 1998) can bring some aspects of these questions into sharper focus. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 1 I review the syntactic and discourse constraints on locative inversion in English, and show how the syntactic constraints fall out as a consequence of locality conditions on satisfaction of the EPP. In section 2 I turn to Spanish, and argue that fronting of PPs in that language is generally A′ type movement, on the view that [Spec,TP] in Spanish is not needed for satisfaction of the EPP. Section 3 examines some apparent discourse differences between fronted PPs and preverbal subjects in Spanish; the conclusion is that they are both topicalized elements, but of two distinct types of topics.