On the position of subjects in Spanish: Evidence from code-switching

Some languages have a fixed subject position, while others are more flexible. Languages like English require pre-verbal subjects; Spanish allow subjects in postverbal position. Because this difference clusters with several linguistic properties distinguishing the two languages, and been perennial issue theory, touching central problems EPP, nature of cross-linguistic variation, relationship between core functional heads. Our project contributes novel source evidence to these debates: Spanish/English code-switching. Code-switching, use one utterance, combines languages’ lexical items their attendant syntactic features single derivation. code-switching, all natural language, is rule-governed, researchers can exploit judgments about well-formedness code-switched sentences draw conclusions combinations they represent. We report on formal judgment experiment testing position code-switching as function presence heads known (from monolingual evidence) affect placement: C(omplementizer) T(ense) By manipulating which head appears we test availability post-verbal under different feature combinations. results show that only available when both C T Spanish; neither alone sufficient. This finding suggests regulating stem from alone, problematic for traditional approaches EPP but line other recent research null subjects.