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

a) V moves to AGR o in NSLs (and we crucially assumed that);
b) there can be no maximal projections adjoined to X' (and specifically to AGR'): this
is a reasonable constraint on X'-structure;
then it follows that no XP can intervene between a true subject in spec of AGR and the verb in
AGR o . This criterion is useless as far as non-quantified subjects are concerned: there is no way to
tell whether adjacency is due to the preverbal subject's being in Spec of AGR or simply to the
accidental fact that no XP happens to intervene. But for quantified subjects the data are clearly
revealing. At least some of the quantified preverbal subjects require adjacency (we will see
examples directly).
So we seem to finally arrive at some conclusion about preverbal subjects: at least some of
them are in a fixed position, which is likely to be Spec of AGR. But let us raise another question
first: we have seen that the restrictions on preverbal subjects are the same as on CLLD elements.
So it might be that even for CLLD elements there was an adjacency requirement when they are
quantifiers of a certain type. And this is indeed the case. What follows is set of pairs of examples
(each pair containing a CLLD example and a preverbal subject example), in a gradation from the
most ill-formed to the best well-formed cases. For the examples with preverbal subjects we
abstract away from Focus fronting, which is irrelevantly acceptable without the part in the
parenthesis and with another intonation, as it would be with objects and other Arguments; for the
latter, however, no clitic would appear. 156 The asterisk at the beginning means the sentence is ill
formed even without the part in the parenthesis; the asterisk inside the latter means that the part
in the parenthesis impairs the sentence or makes it bad:
156 I suspect that there are processes which are similar to
Focus-fronting and nevertheless do not have the typical
intonation and contrastive interpretation of typical Focusfronting.
So, in the judgements below I tried to disregard the
acceptability of the preverbal subjects when a parallel (cliticless)
object fronting is available which intuitively has the
same phonological, interpretative and stylistic flavor. For what
is at stake here is if preverbal subjects are any different from
clitic-resumed elements.
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