1 Dummy prepositions and the licensing of null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese Jairo Nunes Universidade de São Paulo This paper discusses constructions in Brazilian Portuguese in which a null subject is adequately licensed only if the clause containing it is preceded by the dummy preposition de. Assuming that referential null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese are traces of A- movement (see Ferreira 2000, 2009 and Rodrigues 2002, 2004), I argue that the presence of de signals whether or not the embedded clause has received inherent Case and this ultimately determines whether the embedded subject is allowed to move from within its clause and whether it should undergo upward or sideward movement (see Nunes 2001, 2004). 1. Introduction * In this paper I examine the role that dummy prepositions appear to play in the licensing of null subjects in (Colloquial) Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP). I will be specifically concerned with the three types of constructions exemplified below. (1)a. Ninguém concordou com a sugestão do João (de) que nobody agreed with the suggestion of-the João of that o Pedro devia escrever o relatório. the Pedro should write the report ‘Nobody agreed with João’s suggestion that Pedro should write the report.’ b. Ninguém concordou com a sugestão d[o João]i *(de) que nobody agreed with the suggestion of-the João of that eci devia escrever o relatório. should write the report ‘Nobody agreed with Joãoi’s suggestion that hei should write the report.’ * Parts of this paper have been presented at Going Romance 2007, the XVIII Colloquium on Generative Grammar, and the Universities of São Paulo, Connecticut, and Leiden. I would thank these audiences for comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Željko Bošković, Rerisson Cavalcante, João Costa, Mary Kato, Renato Lacerda, Marcello Modesto, Carol Petersen, Josep Quer, Leonor Simioni, and two anonymous reviewers. The results reported here are part of research projects supported by CNPQ (302262/2008-3) and FAPESP (2006/00965-2).