Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics (Jan 2004)
Agreement and Focus in Galician Inflected Infinitives
Abstract
In Galician Inflected Infinitive (henceforth II) clauses we can get the subject in three different positions: postverbal, preverbal or at the very end of the clause. The most common unmarked word order obtains when the subject is either in postverbal position or dropped (Galician is a pro-drop language). I argue that the other two positions are reserved for the subject in focus. This paper accounts for all different subject positions in the II construction: postverbal (straight in-situ checking), preverbal (by means of a Focus Phrase) and sentence final (by means of p-syntactic movement). The various positions of the subject in Galician II clauses provide further support for a bifurcation of the syntax into narrow syntax and p-syntax.
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