1 Subjects, Expletives, and the EPP Peter Svenonius The literature on the three concepts named in the title of this book is vast. In this introduction, I simply provide a sketch (in §1.1-1.3) of the issues that set the scene for the papers in the volume. My discussion is judiciously larded at appropriate points with brief references to those papers, and each paper is summarized in §1.4. In §1.5, I discuss the papers in relation to each other, and then summarize some of their shared assumptions. 1.1. Subjects The subject occupies a precarious position in generative linguistics; on the one hand it is an indispensable concept at a descriptive level, and is accorded basic sta- tus as a primitive notion in some frameworks (along with other grammatical rela- tions); on the other hand it has defeated all attempts at a cross-linguistically valid definition and a substantial part of the field takes it to be no more than a descrip- tive label for an epiphenomenal collection of properties (cf. McCloskey 1997 for a clear overview of the issues). Traditional grammarians distinguish between grammatical or formal subjects and logical or notional subjects; for example Jespersen notes (1927:227-228, 1949:107-110) that in a raising construction like (1a), the grammatical subject is he, but the notional subject of the main clause is the (discontinuous) infinitive clause he to fall ; while in the most deeply embedded clause in (1b) (from Dickens), the grammatical subject is there while the logical subject is what. (1) a. He happened to fall. b. I don’t mean to say that I know what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. At my present level of understanding, it seems that we can deconstruct the tradi- tional subject into three components, one thematic-aspectual (the thematically most prominent argument of a predicate), one morpho-syntactic (classically identified by case and/or agreement), and one discourse-informational (the topical or the- From the forthcoming volume Subjects, Expletives, and the EPP, ed. by Peter Svenonius © 2001 Oxford University Press, New York