Post Verbal Subjects and Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

cases is translated with the English expletive there. Note that in standard English,
the verb agrees with the associate in constructions involving this expletive: 11
(62) There are/*is some cats in the garden.
This contrasts with the French existentials, where agreement is always third
person singular: 12
(63) Il y a/ *ont des chats dans le jardin.
it there has/ have of cats in the garden
‘There are cats in the garden.’
In BP, either third person singular agreement or agreement with the
associate subject is possible. I propose that BP has both an expletive like French il
(pro-il) and an expletive like English there (pro-there).
Pro-there will be assumed to originate inside the small clause (e.g., see
Hazout (2004)) 13 , as a predicate (as in Moro (1993, 1997)) which copies the phi-
features of its argument while in the small clause through agreement (as suggested
in Koopman’s (2006)).
Pro-il on the other hand will be assumed to be a clausal pronoun which can
pronominalizes the small clause. The idea that an expletive pronoun can
pronominalize a clause is present in Rosenbaum’s (1967) discussion of
11 This seems to be true mainly in formal standard English. The use of there’s for both plural and
singular is very common in spoken English. See Schutze (2003) for some discussion.
12 Smith Island English behaves similarly to French:
(i) I don't know how many it is/*are there now. (Parrott, 2001)
13 Though, Hazout, differently from Moro and the analysis in this thesis, takes the expletive to be a
possible subject of the small clause.
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