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

an AP, PP or NP predicate. As before, Spanish does not forbid the b., d. and f. constructions.
If we assume, as in Koopman & Sportiche (1988), that the EA forms a Small Clause with
its VP in Agentive constructions, and that for some reason the subject of the Small clause follows
the predicate in Catalan (optionally in Spanish), then this idea extends naturally to non-VP small
clauses.
It has been contended in several papers (Bonet (1989), Saccon (1991)) that subject
inversion is not possible with copulative constructions involving an individual-level predicate
(in Kratzer's (1988) terminology). 10 The evidence is based on examples like the following:
(17) a. *És intel.ligent en Joan
Is intelligent the Joan
b. *És de Barcelona la Maria
Is from Barcelona the Maria
The question is: are these examples unacceptable because individual-level predicates do
not admit subject inversion at all, or because there is some restriction which excludes these
examples without excluding all cases of subject inversion with individual-level predicates? I will
assume that the latter idea is on the right track.
First of all, it is a general fact that the inverted subject, when sentence-final is Focus.
Then it might be the case that in the preceding examples there is some problem concerning the
10 In fact, several authors have contended that individuallevel-predicate
copulative constructions the subject is directly
generated in Spec of INFL (Kratzer (1988), Torrego (1989)). I
think this is hardly tenable if the split INFL hypothesis is to
be kept, unless it is somehow reinterpreted (e.g., by assuming
that the Argument of an individual level predicate is generated
higher up than the Argument of a Stage level predicate). I will
abstract away from the issue. I think that, being equipped with
the ISH and empty categories, we should not give up strict
locality constraints on predication, unless semanticists
themselves were to say otherwise for strictly semantic reasons,
which is unlikely.
1