Subjects, Tense and Verb-Movement in Germanic and Romance

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T's featural requirements can be satisfied, and, focusing on tense requirements, show how the typology enables us to understand the verb-movement behaviour of the Romance languages vis-à-vis their Germanic counterparts. We also show how the proposed analysis facilitates a new understanding of relevant aspects of the modern English verbal system and its diachrony.