Locative inversion in English *

This article aims at reformulating in more current terms Hoekstra and Mulder’s (1990) analysis of the Locative Inversion (LI) construction, illustrated in (2b) below. The new proposal is crucially based on the assumption that Small Clause (SC) predicates agree with their external argument in φ-features, which may be morphologically reflected, as in the case of adjectival agreement in the Italian copular construction Maria è malata3sg.fem, or abstract, as in the English copular construction. Given this assumption, Hoekstra and Mulder’s analysis can be rephrased in terms of hypothesis (1), which actually constitutes the null hypothesis from the perspective of the Last Resort condition on movement: given that A and B share the same φ-features they can both serve in checking (valuing or deleting) the φ-features of the attracting head H.