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

Focus, which suggests this is a Focus position. It is, however, difficult to imagine what kind of
position this could be: by X-bar theory constraints it can only be a right branching specifier or
the lowest complement in the structure (thus a complement of V, which makes little sense). On
the other hand, that Focus comes rather to the end of the sentence seems to be a widespread
situation across languages, so that a strictly structural account for the Focus status of inverted
subjects might be redundant.
The idea that the inverted subject position is the specifier of VP could raise a potential
problem: verb complements do not seem to c-command this position as far bound variable
binding is concerned. So 0 shows WCO effects:
(2) *No condueix cap cotxei el seui propietari
Not drives no car the his owner
intended reading: 'No car is driven by his owner'
Therefore strict c-command, and not m-command, should be postulated for bound
variable binding if one adopts the hypothesis that inverted subjects occupy the specifier of VP.
To stay on the safe side, I prefer to adopt the view that the basic position for EAs is one of
adjunction to VP. Perhaps this idea, together with the hypothesis that Small Clauses are
adjunction structures, has the advantage of characterizing all predicative nuclei in a sentence as
Small Clauses (which can be of any of the four lexical categories):
(3) a. Johni [ VP ei [ VP eats bananas ]]
b. Johni is [ AP ei [ AP apish ]]
c. Johni is [ NP ei [ NP a monkey ]]
d. Johni is [ PP ei [ PP in the jungle ]]
The only gap in this paradigm would be unaccusative verb clauses, where there would be
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