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

(72) a. Gianni ha fatto (lui) il lavoro (*lui)
G. has done he the job he
b. Gianni ha fatto (*lui stesso) il lavoro (lui stesso)
G. has done he SELF the job he SELF
These facts sound familiar if we have MSA in mind, in that they involve two different
kinds of I-subjects depending on the pre- or post- VP position of the I-subject. But they are not
the same for obvious reasons: lui stesso is neither a SELF element (rather stesso is) nor a
reflexive anaphor in object position. And neither the pre-VP position for lui allows [-anaphoric]
I-subjects not being emphatic (subject inversion is post-VP in the general case), nor does the
post-VP position allow true anaphors (se stesso/ [ DP t stesso ]). Thus we are probably missing
some basic factor that MSA and Italian share without sharing the essential properties considered
here.
Summing up, we would characterize MSA as having two 'I-subject' positions, only one of
which is a θ-position. Perhaps for head-initial languages all θ-positions are to the right of V, and
pre-VP I-subjects (as in MSA, Romanian, Spanish) are always derived by short movement:
(73) AGR o i ... (I-subject) [ VP V (I-subject) ]
-θ +θ
What determines which of these I-subject positions are 'active' (e.g., can be overt) is not
clear: Catalan, Italian, French, many English dialects use the post VP position, Romanian uses
the pre-VP position, Spanish can use both in essentially the same way, and MSA uses each in a
different way. I will not try to account for this type of variation, which might involve low-level
parameterization.
In the next chapter we will argue for a theory that derives BG and, at the same time,
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