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

Abstract

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

The That-Trace Effect: Evidence from Spanish–English Code-Switching

“…Together, these results suggest that subject extraction over an overt complementizer only becomes acceptable when both C and T are in Spanish. Our finding aligns with evidence suggesting that null subjects (Sande 2018), post-verbal subjects (Ebert and Hoot 2018;Hoot and Ebert 2021), and possibly V2 (Vanden Wyngaerd 2020) are also conditioned by C and T together, pointing away from the proposal that the phase head determines the properties of its complement in code-switching (González-Vilbazo and López 2011, 2012. That said, perhaps González-Vilbazo and López's Phase Head Hypothesis could be incorporated into an account of our findings if it were coupled with Feature Inheritance (Chomsky 2008), under which T inherits (some of) its features from C, meaning that C would still be fundamentally running the show.…”

“…Overall, the picture emerging from the code-switching evidence aligns with the crosslinguistic evidence showing a correlation between post-verbal or null subjects and the lack of the that-trace effect. Such a finding was by no means preordained; it was certainly possible to imagine that subject position might involve some feature of T (like the EPP or 'rich agreement') while the that-trace effect might come down to a feature of C. Yet the pattern of judgments in both the present study and our previous experiment (Hoot and Ebert 2021) are exactly parallel. To our eyes, this is a striking piece of evidence in favor of the link between the that-trace effect and a particular subject position.…”

“…That said, perhaps González-Vilbazo and López's Phase Head Hypothesis could be incorporated into an account of our findings if it were coupled with Feature Inheritance (Chomsky 2008), under which T inherits (some of) its features from C, meaning that C would still be fundamentally running the show. Vanden Wyngaerd (2020) suggested something along these lines, as did we in an earlier study (Ebert and Hoot 2018), although we subsequently examined the idea in more detail and found the evidence mixed (Hoot and Ebert 2021). One barrier to applying Feature Inheritance to our data is that the field has not yet settled on its precise details, making its extension to code-switching and to experimental work challenging (but see Shim 2013Shim , 2016.…”

“…She calls this the C+T Hypothesis, but she does not test it directly (her experiment only included items with switches between C and T). In previous work (Ebert and Hoot 2018;Hoot and Ebert 2021), we tested her hypothesis in the domain of subject position (rather than null subjects), conducting an experiment with Spanish-English code-switching in which we found that, indeed, the only sentences that permitted post-verbal subjects were those in which both C and T were in Spanish; whenever either head was in English, post-verbal subjects were not possible.…”

“…Traditional accounts of the EPP have traced cross-linguistic differences in subjects to properties located in T (e.g., the "rich agreement morphology" of the verb raising to T to satisfy the subject requirement, as in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998), so predicting that the language of T will determine code-switching behavior under the Anti-Locality account seems sensible. However, in this case, we must consider our previous empirical evidence of subject position in code-switching: we found that post-verbal subjects were only acceptable when both C and T were in Spanish (Ebert and Hoot 2018;Hoot and Ebert 2021). That is, Spanish T alone was not enough to permit post-verbal subjects, contrary to the usual view of the EPP as a feature of T. If we use this evidence to inform our prediction, then the Anti-Locality account predicts that subject extraction will only be possible when both C and T are in Spanish, because subject extraction follows directly from the availability of post-verbal subject position, whatever its cause.…”