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

interpretation similar to the Catalan sentence:
(42) Ho ha fet ell
It-has done he ('HE has done it')
in that both himself and ell have an emphatic (probably Focus) interpretation. On the other hand,
both occur in a position that can be roughly characterized as VP-final. 26
The obvious objection one can pose to the contention that himself is the I-subject in 0 is
that this element is likely to occupy an A'-position simply because it has a kind of adverbial
interpretation, roughly paraphrasable as 'in the flesh', 'by himself' or 'alone'. However, if we
consider the Catalan equivalent to 0, namely 0:
(43) En Joan ho ha fet ell (mateix)
The Joan it-has done he (SELF)
we can see that the element that is used instead of himself, namely ell (mateix) is in
complementary distribution with the inverted subject:
26 American speakers seem to allow empathic anaphors in nonfinal
position (thanks to B. Schwartz and E. Pierce for pointing
this out to me),:
(i) John has himself done it.
while British speakers seem not to allow this word order.
Parallelly, some Romance languages (Spanish, Romanian)
allow inverted subjects in non sentence-final position (the
order being VSO), while others do not (Italian, Catalan). Since
I am going to assimilate emphatic anaphors to inverted subjects
(both being I-subjects), I think that this kind of variation is
of the same nature: some languages allow I-subjects only as
right VP-adjuncts and others allow them as left VP-adjuncts. I
will not provide any explanation for this contrast. However, see
below for Italian.
1