On the position of subjects in Spanish periphrases: Subjecthood left and right

Diego Gabriel Krivochen,Luis García Fernández

doi:10.7557/1.8.1.4687

Abstract

Chains of auxiliary verbs in Spanish allow for the reconceptualization of well-known grammatical problems under the light of understudied structures. In this paper we will deal with issues regarding the position of subjects in declarative and interrogative sentences featuring auxiliary chains. It will become immediately evident that the dichotomy between pre- and post-verbal subjects results inadequate to provide adequate characterisations for the Spanish cases, in contrast to the situation in English. This is so because post-verbal subjects may appear, a priori, to the right of each auxiliary in a chain. These new data, which have received little attention, constitute a challenge for standard hypotheses about the position of subjects in Spanish.

Highlights

The possibility of having sequences of auxiliary verbs creates so-called auxiliary chains (RAE-ASALE, 2009; Bravo et al, 2015 and related works)
If the whole auxiliary chain is a single syntactic object, as follows from the proposals in Gómez Torrego 1999: 3346, Guéron y Hoekstra 1988: 36-37, among others, we have in turn two options: (i) either the first auxiliary takes with it the subject, which is at the leftmost position, or (ii) the subject remains in a lower position (Spec-TP / Spec-vP; how low depends on partially independent assumptions), and the auxiliary chain moves independently
In this paper we investigated the properties of positions internal to chains of auxiliary verbs, which Ross (1991) dubbed niches and their capacity to host NP subjects

Summary

Introduction

The possibility of having sequences of auxiliary verbs creates so-called auxiliary chains (RAE-ASALE, 2009; Bravo et al, 2015 and related works). Anderson, 2006), and auxiliary chains raise questions about the linear and structural position of subjects which have been overlooked in the literature. These questions are related to the fact that a post-verbal subject (that is: a subject which appears after a verbal head, be it a lexical verb or an auxiliary) in Spanish can occupy more than one position in stark contrast to the state of affairs in English, where only one position is available:. We will see that current models cannot adequately account for the empirical facts we have presented pertaining to inversion and the positions of intermediate subjects With this in mind, we will propose an alternative account of niches under a ‘mixed computation’ viewpoint (independently motivated) which has been argued in previous works to provide adequate structural descriptions for Spanish auxiliary chains.

Auxiliary chains and niches in a comparative perspective

Non-uniformity in auxiliary chains: its consequences for niching

Conclusions