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

sam/tuiton ]. When they are preverbal (perhaps this is not significant in Georgian) they would be
licenced with a resumptive strategy, as we will claim is the case for preverbal (Spec of AGR)
subjects in NSLs.
Finally, there is a language that provides evidence pointing to a possibility not
contemplated so far: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). 46 In this language, inverted subjects
appear between the verb and the complements (VSO) in the unmarked case (while preverbal
subjects are likely to be left-dislocated elements). It is reasonable to assume that VSO is an
instance of 'subject inversion', with V o raised to INFL o and the post-verbal subject left adjoined
to VP. 47
Since MSA is a NSL, our prediction that I-subjects shall be [-anaphoric]. And indeed, I-
subjects in the VSO word-order are:
(69) 'Amala Yusuf/huwa/*nafsuhu al-'amal
Did Y. /he / himself the work
'Yusuf/he did the work'
But the facts are a bit more complex. If we translate 'Joseph/he did the work himself' into
MSA, we have the following sentence:
46 Thanks to Elisabet Nebot and Isabel Herrero (Un. of
Barcelona) for the data and comments. They are not native
speakers (hardly anybody is, for MSA is never a colloquial
language, although it is closer to Saudi dialects than to
Western dialects). In any event, their judgements sounded steady
and confident, giving the impression that they were asked about
trivial and well-known facts.
47 In addition, MSA subject inversion would be similar to
subject inversion in some Northern Italian dialects, where
subject inversion blocks number agreement in the third person.
We will consider this fact in the next chapter.
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