Post Verbal Subjects and Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

Instead, he proposes that the structure in (45) can give rise to two possible
word orders, depending on whether the subject or the predicate of the small clause
raises to spec-TP. If the subject raises, the result is what he calls the ‘canonical’
copular sentence (47). If the predicate DP raises (a case of predicate inversion) the
result is an ‘inverse’ copular sentence (48):
(47) The girls were [sc t the cause of the fight]
(48) The cause of the fight was [sc the girls t ]
Moro provides a number of arguments for his proposal, based on
asymmetries between canonical and inverted copular sentences with respect to
phenomena such as lo and ne cliticization and movement. For example, Moro notes
that sub-extraction is possible from the post-verbal DPs in canonical sentences (49),
but not from the post-verbal DP in inverted copula sentences (50):
(49) Which fight were pictures of the girls the cause of t?
(50) *Which girls were the cause of the fight pictures of t?
Moro rightly points out that if canonical and inverted copulars were both
derived by raising of the subject of a small clause to spec-TP (as in (45) and (46)),
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