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

Coordinated preverbal CPs can trigger plural agreement:
(123) That ... and that... are two well known facts.
Since, as we and many authors argue, these CPs are not in subject position (they would
be dislocated), we could assume that the real subject (some empty category) is a resumptive
element having plural features.
In fact expletives linked to CPs are exceptional in that they are the only ones occupying
θ-marked positions, as shown in 0.b/.c). So let's propose there are two kinds of expletives:
- expletives of the there-type, which merely fulfil the formal requirement of filling the
AGR-identifier in (some) non-NSL and transmitting Case to the I-subject. They are not θ-
marked, since they do not play any role in interpretation.
- expletives of the it-type, which are linked to a CP and behave like Arguments (they
are Case- and θ-marked) except for the fact that they transmit their θ-role to the CP.
We cannot claim that CPs are always associated to an it-expletive, because there are
obvious counterexamples:
(124) I think (*it) that...
assumptions: 99
The distribution of CPs and it-expletives can be accounted for on the following
99 This proposal is inspired on ideas in Authier (1991), who
deals with the contrast between French and English CPexpletives.
Here we will not go into a detailed discussion of
the issue.
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