The dialect of North Hail, a variety of Najdi Arabic, has a set of sentence-initial particles marking topics of various kinds that correspond to those argued by Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) to be characteristic of Italian and German: Shift-Topic, Contrastive Topic, and Familiar Topic. In their work, as in much other work in the cartographic tradition, a hierarchy of abstract topic heads is postulated in the C-domain, which host the topical phrases as specifiers. In North Hail Arabic, the topic heads are overt, realized as particles. Some of the topic heads mark topics by attraction to the C-domain; other particles mark topics by ϕ-feature agreement. The particles in the C-domain agree in ϕ-features with a TP-internal DP, subject or object. Analyzed in terms of Agree (Chomsky 2001, 2008), arguments and adverbials are assigned particular topic values either by agreement or by movement. The particles thus provide evidence that topicality can be a syntactic feature, inherent in lexical items (the particles) and assigned to constituents by operations familiar from standard syntactic relations like subject agreement and case. The theory articulated observes the Inclusiveness Condition, known to be a problem for the cartographic theory of topic and focus.

A movement asymmetry arises in some languages that are otherwise symmetrical for both A- and Ā-movement in the double object construction, including Norwegian, North-West British English, and a range of Bantu languages including Zulu and Lubukusu: a Theme object can be Ā-moved out of a Recipient (Goal) passive, but not vice versa. Our explanation of this asymmetry is based on phase theory— more specifically, a stricter version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition proposed by Chomsky (2001) . The effect is that, in a Theme passive, a Recipient object destined for the C-domain gets trapped within the lower V-related phase by movement of the Theme. The same effect is observed in Italian, a language in which only Theme passives are possible. A similar effect is also found in some Bantu languages in connection with object marking/agreement: object agreement with the Theme in a Recipient passive is possible, but not vice versa. We show that this, too, can be understood within the theory that we articulate.

This article investigates the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC): a head-initial category cannot be the immediate structural complement of a head-final category within the same extended projection. This universal cannot be formulated without reference to the kind of hierarchical structure generated by standard models of phrase structure. First, we document the empirical evidence: logically possible but crosslinguistically unattested combinations of head-final and head-initial orders. Second, we propose a theory, based on a version of Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom, where FOFC is an effect of the distribution of a movement-triggering feature in extended projections, subject to Relativized Minimality.

The traditional view of the null subject as pro identified by Agr (the φ-features of I) cannot be maintained in a theory where Agr is uninterpretable. Two hypotheses are compared with regard to the predictions they make for Finnish null subject constructions: (A) Agr is interpretable in null subject languages, and pro is therefore redundant; (B) null subjects are specified but unpronounced pronouns that assign values to the uninterpretable features of Agr. Since Finnish observes the Extended Projection Principle and has an expletive pronoun, Hypothesis A predicts that null subjects should cooccur with expletives. The prediction is false, favoring B over A. A typology of null subjects is proposed: Null bound pronouns and null generic pronouns in partial null subject languages, including Finnish, are D-less φ, and so are null subjects in consistent null subject languages with Agr, such as Spanish and Greek. Null 1st and 2nd person subjects in Finnish are DPs that are deleted. Null pronouns in languages without Agr, such as Chinese and Japanese, are the only true instances of pro, a minimally specified null noun.

The two central theses are (a) the category moved by stylistic fronting (SF) functions as a pure expletive in its derived position, which is [Spec, IP]; (b) what is moved under SF is only the phonological feature matrix of a category. The theory accounts for most of the properties of SF: why it applies only when there is a subject gap; why it affects almost any category, head or phrase; the locality conditions; and the crosslinguistic variation. SF belongs to Narrow Syntax, not the phonological component. Although the features moved by SF are invisible at LF, the specifier position created by SF is visible and is used by other categories that are visible at LF but invisible at PF.