Abstract
This paper analyzes preverbal overt subjects, comparing Brazilian Portuguese to (other) null-subject languages, especially within Romance. It explores syntactic and semantic properties, including resumption, ellipsis, quantifiers and scope, variable binding, ordering restrictions, pronominal distinctions, minimality violations, bare nouns and definiteness. It concludes that preverbal subjects in Brazilian Portuguese can be realized both in argumental positions (Specifier of the Inflectional or Tense Phrase) and non-argumental positions (Topic Phrase specifiers), with the possibility that both types of positions are filled by the subject in the same clause, incorporating properties that have been argued not to be found together in other languages.
Highlights
This paper considers a topic that has received at least two distinct approaches within the Principles & Parameter/Minimalist syntax literature: the analytical treatment of what is often referred to as the subject of the clause
If the results presented here are on the right track, they indicate one of two outcomes: (i) Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is substantially different from other languages that it is partially compared to here, regarding the properties of preverbal subjects, and one or more mechanisms are necessary to explain why this difference arises; or (ii) the treatment of preverbal subjects proposed for BP reveals a situation that may be present in the other languages under consideration, in that preverbal subjects corresponding to both (3) and (4) would be possible in the individual grammar of one or more of the languages mentioned above
I analyze various other phenomena to further support the argument that both a left-dislocated position and Spec, TP are possible positions where preverbal subjects can be realized in BP, different from more restrictive analyses that have been proposed based on other languages
Summary
This paper considers a topic that has received at least two distinct approaches within the Principles & Parameter/Minimalist syntax literature: the analytical treatment of what is often referred to as the subject of the clause. The relevance of this topic is due partly to the fact that it necessarily has consequences for the treatment of the interaction between agreement, nominative Case and arguably the existence of an EPP requirement on the inflectional/tense (Infl or T) of the clause Even though these topics are not the main focus of this paper, a precise analytical approach to the structural realization of different clausal arguments is crucial for research in this domain to proceed, and this is what this paper focuses on. I will provide detailed arguments that overt preverbal subjects in BP can be realized in either position, depending on certain structural properties of the clause This is different from what has been argued in various proposals for other Romance languages, in which arguments have been made that preverbal subjects are restricted to one or the other structural position, but are not allowed to occur in both positions.
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