Abstract
This paper contrasts a Bolognese postverbal subject construction and other grammars with the common Romance one (also in Bolognese) that has longdistance full agreement of the tensed verb and the Case Licensed subject, with an expletive satisfying EPP. In the new Bolognese data, full agreement is absent, a special clitic occurs, and the postverbal subject is person restricted.Lack of subject agreement also raises questions about its licensing.The Minimalist proposal is that grammars like Bolognese can specify a feature set on theexpletive that checks EPP in this data, and that it is thus an independent second nominalin the domain of the sole agreement and Case Licensing probe, T. This specified expletiveis shown to explain all the properties of this data. For the person restrictions and Case Licensing of the postverbal subject, it applies Cyclic/Multiple Agree, the elaboration ofAgree underlying PCCeffects, to the two nominals. The analysis is extended to othergrammars with similar but slightly differing data by simple manipulation of the featureseton the specified expletive and of the clitic inventory of the grammar.
Highlights
This paper contrasts a Bolognese postverbal subject construction and other grammars with the common Romance one that has longdistance full agreement of the tensed verb and the CaseLicensed subject, with an expletive satisfying EPP
The analysis of all these factors should be unified in a primitive distinction between nonagreeing person restricted postverbal subject construction (naprpvS) and cRpvS, with that distinction capable of capturing the variation observed within naprpvS. We propose that these issues are all related to the expl that occurs in naprpvS, which is a expl with specified features that is available in the grammars that have such data but not in those that don’t
Our proposal rests on the difference between the two expls in these two sets of data: in (1012), the expl has the 3SM features considered default/neutral and natural for expletives in many grammars (Brandi and Cordin 1989, etc), while in naprpvS, we propose that Bolognese specifies an expl that is 3S
Summary
Many Romance grammars permit postverbal subjects (pvSs), and an extensive literature on them has developed. To clarify the fourth important issue in explaining naprpvS, we build on the stan dard analyses of cRpvS as involving an expletive pro (expl) in a preverbal position like the one occupied by a preverbal subject in data such as (34) (Rizzi 1982, 1986, Burzio 1986, Cardinaletti 1997b, 2004, Belletti 2005, Roberts 2010, among many others). The fourth issue in understanding naprpvS, is to explain why the valuation of uφ on T and the CaseLicensing of the pvS by T are apparently separated
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