1. Null Subjects
Spanish is a null subject language, meaning that the grammatical subject of a clause is permitted to be phonologically null or silent, as is illustrated in (1):
(1) Hablaron de política.
‘[They] spoke about politics.’
Here, the suffix -aron does an analogous job to an English-style pronominal subject, and indeed conveys the same grammatical information, viz. that the subject is third person and plural. More generally, the rich verbal morphology that is characteristic of Spanish and other Romance languages can be regarded as satisfying the same syntactic constraint – designated as the EPP in the Chomskyan tradition – that is satisfied in English by the presence of an overt subject (see Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998).
Null subject languages typically also allow free subject inversion (illustrated in 2.1 and 2.2 below) as well as being immune to the so-called Comp-trace effect (also known as the that-trace effect). The Comp-trace effect is illustrated by English sentences such as (2) below, which is problematic due to the presence of the complementizer that (the sentence is fine if that is deleted):
(2) *Who did you say that wants to talk to me?
If a language is immune to the Comp-trace effect, the structure in (2) is wholly grammatical. Thus Spanish (3) below is fully acceptable, despite the presence of que, which is equivalent to English that.
(3) ¿Quién dijiste que quiere hablar conmigo?
*‘Who did you say that wants to talk to me?’
The relevant issue as regards examples like (2) and (3) is that they involve the movement of a wh-expression (who in (2) and quién in (3)) from its base position as the subject of the embedded finite clause to a position at the very beginning of the sentence. This is shown more explicitly in (4) and (5) below, where the copy of the wh-expression in strikethrough font indicates the latter’s base position (i.e. the one corresponding to its grammatical role as the subject of the embedded finite verb).
(4) *Who did you say that who wants to talk to me?
(5) ¿Quién dijiste que quién quiere hablar conmigo?
Languages that are subject to the Comp-trace effect require the complementizer (e.g. that in English) to be deleted whenever a wh-subject is moved out of a finite embedded clause to the beginning of the sentence. Immunity to this effect appears to be a general property of null subject languages (see Rizzi 1982), although the exact reason for this is a long standing matter of debate (see Rizzi and Shlonsky 2007).
2. Declarative Sentences
2.1. Intransitive Verbs
In a non-technical sense, an intransitive verb is one that one that is used without a direct object, e.g. vivir ‘live’, morir ‘die’, llegar ‘arrive’. In principle, the subject may either precede or follow an intransitive verb in a Spanish declarative sentence, although certain specific situations call for one type of order rather than the other.
Bare subjects
In the first place, subjets consisting in a bare (i.e. determinerless) noun are almost always postverbal. This is illustrated in (6) to (9) below.
(6) Sale agua por debajo de la lavadora.
‘Water is coming out from under the washing machine.’
(7) Entra luz por la persiana.
‘Light is coming in through the blind.’
(8) Ya se venden turrones en los supermercados.
‘Turrón is already on sale in the supermarkets.’
(9) Viven lobos en aquellas montañas.
‘There are wolves in those mountains.’
Unaccusative verbs
Secondly, unaccusative verbs – those which designate happenings rather than deliberate actions – prefer but do not require postverbal subjects, particularly if the subject is an indefinite noun phrase:
(10) Aparecieron unas cabras sobre un risco [. . .]
‘Some goats appeared at the top of a crag . . .’
(Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz; Corpus del Español)
(11) Murieron más de mil doscientas personas.
‘More than one thousand two hundred people died.’
(12) Se nos ha cortado la luz.
‘The power supply has gone done.’
Thetic judgments
Sentences (6) to (12) are instances of what are variously known as thetic judgments, presentational sentences or all-new statements, their characteristic being that they do not segment the information expressed into a topic and a comment. There is an ample literature on such sentences, but see in particular Lambrecht 2000 and Sasse 1987. In English, which lacks free subject inversion, theticity is expressed by placing the pitch accent (i.e. the intonation peak) on the subject, as opposed to placing it on the last constituent in the clause, which is its usual position in topic–comment sentences. In a sense, then, where Spanish has subject-inversion, English has accent-inversion, as illustrated in the contrast between (13) and (14) below (where capitals indicate the accented word).
Topic–comment (What did X do?)
(13) He/She ran AWAY.
Thetic (What happened?)
(14) My CAT ran away.
Subject focus
A further important case of free subject inversion arises with focused subjects. With intransitive verbs, and also transitive verbs in cases when the object is a weak pronoun (or clitic), such subjects are typically clause-final in languages like Spanish. This is due to to the combination of the following facts: (i) focused constituents typically bear the clause’s pitch accent (i.e. they host the clause’s intonation peak) and (ii) the unmarked position of the pitch accent in languages like Spanish is on the last stressed syllable in the clause. Two examples are given below in (15) and (16), the latter illustrating the case in which the verb is transitive but the object is a clitic.
(15) —¿Quién bailó? —Bailó María.
‘Who danced?’ ‘María danced.’
(16) —¿Quien lo compró? —Lo compró José.
‘Who bought it?’ ‘José bought it.’
Prepositional complements
As regards prepositional complements of intransitive verbs, the default position is postverbal (in keeping with the assumption that the verb phrase in Spanish is head-initial). However the prepositional complement can also be fronted, usually triggering subject–verb inversion:
(17) En esta fábrica trabaja mi primo.
‘My cousin works in this factory.’
(18) De eso va su libro.
‘That’s what his book is about.’
(19) A eso me refiero.
‘That’s what I'm referring to.’
The construction illustrated in (17) is known as locative inversion, because the fronted PP is a locative complement, while the structures in (18) and (19) are instances of what Cinque (1990a) calls resumptive preposing. The latter phenomenon is essentially anaphoric, in the sense that the fronted phrase ‘must either directly resume an identical phrase in the immediately preceding discourse or be inferentially linked to such a phrase’ (Cinque 1990a:87). For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon in Spanish, from a primarily semantic perspective, see Leonetti and Escandell Vidal 2010.
Locative inversion and residual V2
Locative inversion is often analysed as a sub-class of thetic judgments (see e.g. Lambrecht 2000). However, an arguably more plausible approach is to treat it, together with the resumptive preposing structure in (18) and (19), as a residual Verb Second (V2) effect. This term, due to Rizzi (1990b), implies that the relevant subject–verb inversion is analogous to the inversion exhibited in direct questions and hence is a syntactic corollary of the fronting of a constituent rather than a reflection of information structure, as it is in (6) to (12) and (15) to (16). From a theoretical point of view, the difference between the two types of inversion resides primarily in the putative locus of the finite verb, which is analysed as being in the clause-periphery in residual V2 but as being clause-internal in thetic judgments and subject focus. Residual V2 – though not necessarily the specific manifestation that is resumptive preposing – is not limited to languages with free subject inversion (for example, it is found in direct questions in English), whereas subject–verb inversion due to theticity or subject focus is limited to such languages.
The term ‘residual V2’ implies in theory that the language in question has evolved from being a full V2 language; that is, one in which the finite verb in main clauses is always the second linear contituent, as happens in modern German (give or take a handful of exceptional cases). Many scholars do in fact assume that Old Spanish was a V2 language (see Fontana 1994) but the data do not point unambiguously towards that analysis (see Rivero 1993, Sitaridou 2011, Mackenzie and van der Wurff 2012). Nevertheless, despite this uncertainty, the term ‘residual V2’ can be used as a descriptive label for the type of subject–verb inversion that arises as a corollary of the fronting of a phrase (e.g. wh-movement, topicalization etc.) as opposed to free subject inversion, which is associated purely with information structure (specifically, subject focus and theticity).
SVO and VSO orders
In non-technical usage, a transitive verb is one that is used with a direct object. In modern Spanish, the unmarked constituent order in declarative clauses whose finite verb is a transitive one appears to be SVO (i.e. subject + verb + direct object) but historically the unmarked order was arguably VSO, a pattern which is still possible even in modern Spanish. The two orders are illustrated for modern Spanish in (20) and (21), while (22) provides an example of VSO from seventeenth-century Spanish.
(20) María se ha comprado un nuevo coche.
‘María has bought herself a new car.’
(21) Se ha comprado María un nuevo coche.
‘María has bought herself a new car.’
(22) Vio Carlos a su hermano en casa de Estela
‘Carlos saw his brother at Estela’s house’
(Juan Pérez de Montalbán, Sucesos y prodigios de amor, 1620; Corpus del Español)
VSO word order is quite common cross-linguistically and the standard theoretical analysis of it assumes the subject remains in its initial merge site, with the finite verb being deleted in its own initial merge site and then re-merged to the left of the subject, as shown in (23).
(23) [verb, [subject, [verb, object]]]
Object fronting
In clauses that would otherwise be SVO, or just VO if the subject is a null one, the object can undergo resumptive preposing, analogously to the PP complements in (18) and (19), as is illustrated in (24) below.
(24) esos mismos aminoácidos podías encontrar en el yogurt
‘you could find the same amino acids in yogurt’
(Habla Culta: La Paz: M22; Corpus del Español)
While examples like (24) are by no means abnormal in modern Spanish, a much more common structure for achieving the discourse-pragmatic effect of resumptive preposing is clitic left dislocation (CLLD).
An additional object fronting construction that can be found in Spanish instantiates what Quer (2002) calls Quantificational QP-Fronting, whereby an NP consisting in or introduced by a quantifier is moved to a preverbal position. This is illustrated by algo in (25) below and by a mucha gente in (26).
(25) Si algo hizo ese hombre ya lo ha pagado con muchos años de prisión.
‘If that man did something, he’s atoned with many years in prison.’
(Patricio Chamizo, Paredes, un campesino extremeño, 1974; Corpus del Español)
(26) Como casi todos los años, a mucha gente tomó de manera imprevista.
‘Like almost every year, it took a lot of people by surprise.’
(Augusto Casola, El laberinto, 1972; Corpus del Español)
Both quantificational QP-Fronting and resumptive preposing trigger obligatory subject–verb inversion if the subject is non-null (see example (25)). This inversion can plausibly be analysed as being a residual V2 effect; indeed, both types of fronting were common in medieval Spanish (see Mackenzie and van der Wurff 2012).
3. Interrogative clauses
In standard Spanish, subject–verb inversion is in principle obligatory in direct and indirect wh-questions (unless the wh-phrase is actually the subject, in which case the latter precedes the verb). Inversion with a fronted wh-object is illustrated in (27) and (28) below.
(27) ¿Qué compró tu padre? (Not *¿Qué tu padre compró?)
‘What did your father buy?’
(28) ¿Cuántos goles metieron los argentinos? (Not *¿Cuántos goles los argentinos metieron?)
‘How many goals did the Argentinians score?’
The inversion in examples like this is a further instance of residual V2. According to the standard analysis, the finite verb moves across the subject to the clause periphery, as a corollary of the wh-movement undergone by the fronted wh-phrase (the object in the two examples above). For instance, (27) can be analysed as in (29), where the strikethrough font indicates the initial merge sites of the finite verb (compró) and of the latter’s wh-object (qué).
(29) ¿Qué compró tu padre compró qué?
Despite the general principle that wh-interrogatives undergo subject–verb inversion, certain classes of wh-adjunct can be fronted without triggering such inversion. The two examples below are from Torrego (1984:106).
(30) ¿En qué medida la constitución ha contribuido a eso?
‘In what way has the constitution contributed to that?’
(31) ¿Por qué Juan quiere salir antes que los demás?
‘Why does Juan want to leave before the others?’
An additional interrogative structure in which subject–verb inversion is not obligatory is that of open questions:
(32) ¿Los primos vendrán mañana? or ¿Vendrán mañana los primos?
‘Will the cousins come tomorrow?’
In combinations of a finite plus a nonfinite verb, an inverted subject can almost always be placed immediately after the finite verb or immediately after the nonfinite verb:
(33) ¿Puedes tú hablar con ellos? or ¿Puedes hablar tú con ellos?
‘Can you talk to them?’
(34) ¿Está María cantando? or ¿Está cantando María?
‘Is María singing?’
The one case where an inverted subject does not have this freedom of placement is in the compound tenses, where the auxiliary haber cannot be separated from the past participle:
(35) ¿Ha venido alguien? (Not *¿Ha alguien venido?)
‘Has ayone come?’
4. Position of adverbs
For qualifying adverbs as well as temporal and locative adverbials, the neutral position in Spanish is arguably between the verb and its complement, as in the two examples below:
(36) Ganaron fácilmente a los ingleses.
‘They easily beat the English.’
(37) las autoridades migratorias de ese país deportaron ayer a otros 56 hondureños
‘the immigration authorities of that country yesterday deported another 56 Hondurans’
(La Prensa, Honduras, June 10 1998; Corpus del Español)
Assuming the verb merges initially with its complement (the direct object in the above examples), the placement of the adverb immediately to the right of the verb implies a syntactic re-ordering analogous to that found in NPs in which an adjective separates the noun from its complement. For example, (36) can be analysed as having a derivation that involves head movement of the finite verb ganaron out of its initial merge site into a position to the left of the adverb, as is shown in (38) below.
(38) Ganaron fácilmente [ganaron a los ingleses].
Conventionally the ‘landing site’ of the Spanish verb, following head movement as in (38), is identified with Chomsky’s T(ense) position, which hosts the auxiliary verb in English. This would account for certain similarities between English Aux and Spanish V, such as their position in relation to an adverb (compare Eng. They have easily beaten the English) and the fact that interrogative subject–verb inversion involves Aux in English but V in Spanish (see examples (27) and (28) above).
An additional class of adverb comprises those that express an attitude to the proposition as whole. As in English, these usually appear in clause initial position in Spanish, as is shown in (39).
(39) Felizmente dejaron de interesarse por el asunto.
‘Fortunately they lost interest in the matter.’
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