Subject Relatives and Expletives in Early New High German

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:The status of the subject position in German has been the source of some debate.1 For example, some studies (Biberauer 2004; Richards and Biberauer 2005) have argued that German does not have an EPP requirement in the traditional sense. The absence of an expletive that occurs specifically in the subject position (as opposed to the topic position in Spec,CP) seems to support the argument that Spec,TP has no special status in German. This paper will argue against such analyses, and show that in historical stages of German, we see evidence of a subject expletive licensed specifically to fill Spec,TP. This expletive, da in Early New High German (ENHG), is merged specifically when the logical subject does not move to Spec,TP, leaving the position empty. This supports a traditional analysis of the EPP in German. Furthermore, I will show that the existence of expletive da lends support to the argument that two (non-topic) subject positions are available in the German clause structure (cf. Haeberli 1999, 2000, 2005), which I take to be Spec,TP and Spec,vP (the base position of the subject).