English Expletive Constructions Are Not Infected

Referential, Quasi, and Expletive Subjects in L2 English of Persian Speakers

The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...

An Inquiry into Existential Constructions

Existential constructions play an important role in the development of Generative Grammar. Their special natures urge linguists to pay painstaking effort to give them a unified account. At first we have a brief review of the relevant study of these constructions and examine their strong points and weakness. On the basis of their study, we assume that in existential constructions of SVO language...

Expletives as Arguments : Germanic Existential Sentences Revisited *

We propose an analysis for expletive-associate constructions within the minimalist framework outlined by Chomsky (1991, and later). Specifically, we argue that the expletive is an argument expression that must raise to the (most) external subject position in order to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle and check nominative case, while number agreement is checked by the associate. We prese...

The Typology of Expletive THERE

In this article I propose an alternative account of expletive THERE based on the theory that formal features may move overtly at PF. Specifically, I argue that the «inadequacies» of expletive THERE alluded to in Chomsky (1993: 33) are the result of the fact that THERE is simply a collection of formal features, an «alternative» spell-out of the Case and Agreement features of a lexical NP and has...

Transitive Expletive Constructions and the Object Shift Parameter