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This is a comparative study of the different positions of postverbal subjects in two closely related languages that nevertheless show clear differences in this respect.
The comparative study will allow us to reject the idea that postverbal subjects in Romance languages are in a unique in situ position Spec VP as has been proposed recently (Motapayane1995, Ordóñez 1998, Costa 2000, Alexiadou i Anagnostopoulou 2001, Cardinaletti 2001). On the contrary, this study will show clearly that there is a need for two positions for postverbal subjects in order to understand the parametric differences between Catalan and Spanish. The general hypothesis will be that the subjects can access a higher Spec of what I will call SubjP, but not Catalan. This will account for the different distribution of subjects respects to adverbs, quantifiers, and restructuring contexts. This paper clearly shows that a finer and richer functional structure above VP and below the final landing site of subjects is needed to account for the differences between Catalan and Spanish. Therefore, this paper is another contribution to the cartographic studies initiated by Rizzi (1997).
