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

particles. 102 The correlation seems to have some significance: languages losing the NSL-status
often shift from preverbal negation to postverbal negation: this happened in the transition from
Old English to middle English and in the transition from Middle French to Modern French (see
Pollock (1989)).
The fact that French [-assertive] clauses can have subject inversion, but not null
subjects, suggests that the two facts need not correlate. Let us rephrase the facts in our theoretical
terms.
We proposed that when AGR o is rich enough, it is the AGR-identifier and then:
a) it can directly Case mark the I-subject.
b) the I-subject can be a null pronominal (in non-NSLs it can only be a null anaphor).
Suppose that a) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for b) to hold. French [-
assertive] clauses would be a case where a) but not b) holds.
There is another well-known case where something similar happens: some Northern
Italian dialects (see, e.g., Rizzi (1982), Brandi & Cordin (1989)). In these dialects, the agreement
morphology in a strict sense is not rich enough to allow null subjects. But, as initially proposed
by Rizzi (1982), subject clitics are part of AGR and make AGR rich enough to allow null
subjects. Now, in some of these dialects (Paduan -Rizzi (1982), Trentino and Fiorentino -Brandi
& Cordin (1989)-) subject clitics are required to allow null I-subjects, but they are not necessary
(and in fact not possible) to allow an overt I-subject:
102 Zanuttini's (1991) typology of languages concerning
negation is based on the same observation. Actually, the
correlation with the (non-)NSL status is not strict: there are
Italian dialects with post-verbal negation which are NSLs; and
Brazilian Portuguese is a non-NSL having preverbal negation. We
will speculate on the parameterization of the relative
hierarchical position of ΣP in Chapter 5.
1