Post Verbal Subjects and Agreement in Brazilian Portuguese

(67) is obvious [it [ CP that John is intelligent]] -> It is obvious that John
is intelligent.
(68) seems [it [ CP that Mary likes apples]] -> It seems [t [that Mary
likes apples.]
Although different in detail, this implementation is very reminiscent of
Rosenbaum’s (1967) approach to the derivation of extraposition, as well as Moro’s
proposal for raising sentences. 16
Pronominalization of the small clause by pro-il will be achieved in a similar
manner. For example, pro-it would pronominalize the small clause complement of
an unaccusative verb roughly as follows: 17
(69) [ VP arrive [ pro-it [ SC [a girl] there]]]
Now that some of the general assumptions of the proposal have been
presented, we can proceed to see how the analysis will account for the patterns of
agreement in BP.
(i) *it believes [t [that Mary likes apple]].
16 Though Rosenbaum proposed that the pronoun and the clause originated in subject position in the
first case, with extraposition of the clause to the right. Thus, (i) would be a closer representation of
Rosenbaum’s analysis (65):
(i) it that John is intelligent is obvious -> it t is obvious that John is intelligent.
Moro’s (1997) analysis of raising constructions also differs from (68) in a similar way. He
proposes that it is a predicate expletive taking a clause as an argument, thus proposing the following
merge order:
(ii) [[CP that Mary likes apples] it]
I will adopt the order inspired by Kayne (2002) in the text for simplicity of presentation. However,
slightly changing my proposal to adopt Moro’s merger order should not be too problematic if
necessary, given the possibility of predicate inversion of it, allowing for it to reach spec-TP in
Moro’s approach.
17 Note that it does not follow that SCs necessarily have be pronominalized.
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