Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

Chapter 1
Introduction
The present thesis is conceived within the Principles and Parameters framework. 1 It is an
attempt to explore an alternative hypothesis to some standard assumptions within this
framework, basically concerning sentence subjecthood and the Null Subject phenomenon.
Since a good deal of hypotheses in recent years are based on assumptions we challenge
here (especially concerning null expletives in subject inversion structures), and since the
consequences of the alternative view we will propose are far-reaching, I cannot by any means
commit myself to provide an adequate answer to many of the questions that could naturally be
posed to the proposals I will advance. Ideally, a new hypothesis has to cover all the relevant data
covered by previous hypotheses and possibly some more, and has to face less problems. But it is
also legitimate to draw back to challenge some basic premises, even if, by doing so, some data
that previous theories could handle fall now out of the predictions. This is what happened, for
instance, in generative linguistics when specific rules were abandoned in favor more principled
accounts during the 1970's.
So, for instance, the present thesis has little to say about Nominative assignment in
contexts of INFL-to-COMP. 2 My opinion is that ideally the theory should say little about it,
because INFL-to-COMP should be orthogonal to Nominative assignment. But actually some
facts (especially concerning the V-2 phenomenon) seem to suggest that subjects have a special
1 See Chomsky (1986-b) for a review of some essential
contentions specific to the framework, although the spirit of
the framework can be traced back to the early 1980's (Chomsky
(1981)).
2 This has been a fruitful topic of debate in recent
proposals by Rizzi & Roberts (1989), Rizzi (1991-a), and Roberts
(1991-a).
1