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

c. aff. imperatives: (*ja) ves-hi (ja) avui!
(*already) go-there (alr.) today
'do go there right today'
d. neg. imperatives: (encara) no hi vagis (encara)!
(yet) not there-go (yet)
'Don't go there yet'
The acceptability judgements are clear cut. Especially significant is, I think, the case of
imperatives: a minimal contrast such as affirmation/negation involves a change from enclisis to
proclisis, and correlatively, a sharp change in the possibility for those adverbs to precede the
verb. A natural and simple explanation is that, since enclisis involves an extra step in head-to-
head movement, the adverbs in the specifier of the lower head shift in word order w.r.t. the verb
once the verb moves a head up. This account is not possible within Kayne's hypothesis, where
the extra movement is adjunction to next I', since this does not predict any word order change
w.r.t. specifiers or adjuncts.
I will not develop in depth the question of what the upper head in this enclisis account is.
In the imperatives it could be C o : as evidence for this we have the fact that affirmative
imperatives strictly forbid COMP material preceding them, whereas negative imperatives do not:
(36) a. (**Que) ves-hi!
1
(That) go-there!
'Do go there!
b. (Que) no hi vagis!
(That) not there-go!
Don't you go there!
In infinitives and gerunds the upper head for extra-movement could be respectively a