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The null subject has always been central to linguistic theory, because it tells us a great deal about the underlying structure of language in the human brain, and about the interface between syntax and semantics. Null subjects exist in languages such as Italian, Chinese, Russian and Greek where the subject of a sentence can be tacitly implied, and is understood from the context. In this systematic overview of null subjects, José Camacho reviews the key notions of null subject analyses over the past 30 years and encompasses the most recent findings and developments. He examines a balance of data on a range of languages with null subjects and also explores how adults and children acquire the properties of null subjects. This book provides an accessible and original account of null subject phenomena, ideal for graduate students and academic researchers interested in syntax, semantics and language typology.

Overt preverbal subjects in Spanish have been claimed to be in an adjoined, peripheral layer of the clause and in IP-layer. Part of the motivation for the different analyses stems from mixed A and A-bar properties they display. I argue that subjects do not appear in a single, unique position, but rather in several functional projections along the extended verbal projection. Consequently, different A and A-bar properties are expected. In some cases, the properties of those projections will be determined in the course of the derivation: if a verb raises to a certain projection, it will render this projection active for agreement purposes and trigger movement of the subject to its specifier.

We test adverb-verb word orders in Peruvian Spanish against analyses of verb movement (Pollock 1989, Embick & Noyer 2001). While the preferred order is V-adv-O, the alternative Adv-V-O is also possible. We propose that the verb raises in overt syntax and morphological insertion targets either the higher or the lower position. In the latter case, morphological requirements force the more computationally costly option of T-to-V lowering. We analyze the ungrammaticality of neg-adv-V as a blocking of the selectional restriction requirements of neg (the extended verbal projection, including T) by the intervening adverb. This distribution is parallel to English do-insertion in negative contexts (I don’t frequently eat vs. * I not frequently eat), where neg selects for a -T category (cf. Williams 1994).

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