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

(35) Pictures of many students aren't here
For many speakers 0 cannot be interpreted with many having narrow scope, while the
narrow scope interpretation in 0 is clear and exclusive.
In conclusion, a theory LF expletive-replacement is problematic for scope interpretation,
and a theory of adjunction to the expletive, conceived as a solution to this problem, does not
work much better.
Both the theory of co-superscripting and the theories of LF-replacement/adjunction share
a common idea: expletives would pose a problem for BT if some grammatical principle or
process did not neutralize their BT effects. I think that this approach is suspect in the following
sense. As noted by Borer (1986):
(36) Overt expletives never agree with the Argument they are linked to.
Typical overt expletives are singular (or adverbial, as English there) independently of the
number feature of their Argument. We can conceive expletives as essentially uninflected
elements, and then it is quite plausible that this fact alone is sufficient to exclude them from the
scope of BT. If we assume that Binding involves sharing of phi-features, then expletives cannot
bind, and no further stipulation is required. In other words, a theory which neutralizes BT effects
in expletive constructions appears to be spurious because there is nothing to neutralize.
On the other hand, if expletives are not coindexed with the Argument in the same way as
in Chains, the notion of CHAIN is considerably weakened: either we allow some other linking
device (such as co-superscripting) for expletive CHAINS or we give up any linking device: in
both cases, there is no unitary linking device for CHAINS.
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In conclusion there seems to be a tension between a theory of CHAINS, which conceives