Susann Fischer
5. Summary and Conclusion
It was argued that the availability of SpecTP goes hand in hand with the availability of expletive drop in a language. As long as SpecTP is available in a non-null-subject language and subjects can be placed in SpecTP no expletive needs to be introduced in SpecAgrSP, since subjects in non-null-subject languages can check [D] either when moved to SpecAgrSP or when moved to SpecTP. Only when Spec TP is no longer available, and postverbal subjects remain inside VP, [D] needs to be checked either by movement of the subject into SpecAgrSP or by introducing an expletive. Under this assumption it is possible to account for the change from Old French to Modern French (and for many other languages outside Romance as well, e.g. Modern Icelandic, Old English, Old Swedish etc.) without referring to morphology and without the need to claim that Old French was a pro-drop language.
As concerns Spanish and Catalan, it has been shown that Old Spanish and Old Catalan exhibit a further postverbal position namely SpecTP into which subjects are allowed to move into (even in Old Catalan). In both, the medieval and the modern languages it is the verb that checks the EPP by verb-raising. This allows the assumption that preverbal subjects move for independent reasons. It has been suggested that preverbal subjects in Old Spanish and Old Catalan move for discourse reasons independent of any Verb-Second constraint and independent of the need to check of the EPP. In Modern Spanish and Modern Catalan it has been argued by Masullo (1993) and Suñer (2002) that the subject position SpecAgrSP has a dual character allowing A and A’ elements to turn up there. This dual character might be interpreted as a sign of grammaticalisation according to Li and Thompson (1976), i.e.
preverbal subjects in Modern Spanish and Modern Catalan are already grammaticalised topics and on their way to become grammatical subjects like in Modern French. In Old Spanish and Old Catalan however, these preverbal subjects clearly have to be interpreted as topics, they are [+definite/+specific] which seems to nicely explicate why definite articles turned up first in preverbal position in Romance (Company 1991).
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