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

Notice that 0 and 0 are standard assumptions for Chains (therefore they should also be for
CHAINS). 0 is a theoretically desirable result on the grounds of simplicity and generality. 19 The
extended projection principle in 0 is also a natural development once we adopt a theory of
CHAINS.
Notice also that 0 in conjunction with 0 implies that expletives are always linked to an
Argument. So, the subject of a weather verb like to rain has to be an Argument itself, since there
is no other Argument in the sentence for an expletive-Argument CHAIN to be formed. Let us
assume, then, that what Chomsky (1981) dubbed a quasi-Argument (i.e., the subject of weather
verb) is an Argument as far as 0 is concerned.
For the above theory to work, we have to assume that PRO has some Case. This is in the
spirit of the theory of Visibility (see Chomsky (1986-b)), by which Case is necessary for a Chain
(CHAIN) to be assigned a θ-role: a CHAIN headed by PRO needs a θ-role as any other, so some
kind of Case should be available for PRO. Let us therefore assume PRO bears some (possibly
intrinsic) Case.
2.3. Conditions on Expletive CHAINS
The theory developed thus far does not say anything about the wellformedness
conditions on expletive CHAINS. In fact, there are only three types of well-formed expletive
CHAINS, according to standard accounts:
- expletive-CP CHAINS (It strikes me that...);
- expletive-indefinite CHAINS (There came a man); and
19 In fact, we could expect that Accusative, like Nominative,
is not always available: still, like Nominative, its
distribution would not be subject to lexical idiosyncrasies, but
rather to syntactic constraints (e.g., passives could possibly
be non Accusative-assigning contexts).
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