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

We have tacitly assumed that in the latter case, the DP in Spec of AGR forms a Chain
with the I-subject. If Chains are formed by movement in the standard case, this suggests that the
I-subject itself moves to Spec of AGR, leaving an empty anaphor as I-subject at S-structure. Is
this result correct?
For the Germanic languages, we saw that, even when the I-subject is not empty, a trace
can always be claimed to be present, as exemplified in 0, where the non-empty I-subject is in fact
a floating element:
(143) a. Johni did it ti
anaphor:
b. Johni did it [ DP ti himself]
In French, however, the I-subject cannot be claimed to always involve an empty
(144) Jean l'a fait lui
J. it-has done he
'John did it himself'
As we saw, in 0, the I-subject lui cannot be analyzed as a floating element cooccurring
with a trace as it does not form a possible constituent with the preverbal subject. Then no trace is
involved in this Case. So the dependency between Jean and lui, even if similar to a Chain, is not
a standard case of Chain (nor is it a standard case of CHAIN either, since there is no expletive).
We have not presented any account for why French allows such a non-standard kind of
Chain formation while Germanic languages do not. We will try to derive this contrast from some
independent linguistic facts.
Kayne (1987) assumes that French has Object Agreement. Although he is not very
precise as regards the characterization of this Agreement, it could be naturally conceived, within
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