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

prediction is then that in French FQs are not necessarily left behind by movement and therefore
need not form a possible constituent with their preverbal subject. Specifically, tous les deux/trois
'all the two/three' (= 'both'/'the three of them') are FQs that do not form a possible constituent
with their antecedent:
(146) a. Les enfants /ils sont allés tous les deux au cinéma
The children/they are gone all the two to-the movies
'The children/they have both gone to the movies'
b. *Tous les deux les enfants / *tous les deux ils
All the two the children all the two they
'Both the children' / 'They both'
For NSLs having object agreement with a pattern similar to the French one (Italian,
some Catalan dialects), the minimality problem does not arise, since we assume that those
languages never involve I-subject raising.
Let us briefly speculate on two issues that the above approach raises. One is the
existence of resumptive A-Chains, as we could call the Spec-AGR/I-subject dependencies in
French cases like 0. How do they escape being subject to the ECP? In fact, a representational
point of view (which is always worth keeping an eye on) would not easily distinguish between
resumptive and movement A-Chain.
It seems, however, that the distinction between movement dependencies and
resumptive dependencies is an irreducible complexity: in the case of A'-dependencies it would be
hard to reduce one to the other. 104 It is clear as well that resumptive strategies are more
permissive than movement strategies. Then it seems that it could be interesting to extend the
distinction to A-Chains, provided we manage to put some constraints on the availability of the
options (such as the markedness strategy we propose).
104 See Cinque (1990) for extensive discussion on the issue.
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