Georg A. Kaiser

Postverbal subjects in Romance and German: Some notes on the Unaccusative Hypothesis☆

This study deals with the problems presented by postverbal subjetcs in constructions with unaccusative verbs, because they apparently are counterexamples to the explanatory power of the Unaccusative Hypothesis. The paper defends the position that such examples do not weaken the hypothesis since it is assumed that such postverbal subjects ought to leave the original object position and move to a position where nominative case is regularly assigned. This account is supported by two kinds of consideration. On the one hand, there exists no inherent partitive case to justify the lack of movement, and on the other, agreement facts and distribution of expletive pronouns in different Romance languages and in German show that the postverbal position of subjects are not but the result of movements compatible with the assignment of nominative case.

On expletive subject pronoun drop in Colloquial French

This paper sets out to contribute to the debate on the morpho-syntactic status of phonologically weak or clitic subject pronouns in Colloquial French by discussing finite impersonal constructions in which the expletive subject pronoun is nonexpressed. The paper provides arguments against an approach in terms of inflectional affixes, showing that the non-expression of this pronoun is in fact syntactically restricted. On the basis of the further finding that the non-expression of the expletive represents the continuation of a grammatical trait of older stages of the language in which the non-expression of subject pronouns was generally possible, a tentative proposal is put forward which crucially draws on information structure.

V2 or not V2? Subject-Verb Inversion in Old and Modern French Interrogatives

In generative grammar, word order variation is often analyzed as a reflex of differences in syntactic derivations. According to more recent approaches, these derivations are considered to be related to specific properties of functional categories. In particular, differences with respect to verb placement are often treated as depending on the internal structure and properties of the functional category C(OMP). It is assumed that in languages which exhibit general verb-second effects C contains finiteness features forcing the finite verb to move to that position.