Synchronic and diachronic aspects of overt subject raising in English

This paper attempts to account for synchronic and diachronic aspects of overt subject raising in English by incorporating the notion ‘subject of predication’ as a feature checking relation. First, it is argued that the ‘subject of predication’ feature originates in v, and because of its effects on semantic interpretation, it requires a full nominal subject, not only its formal features, in [Spec, TP], thereby motivating overt subject raising in Present-day English. Then, by examining the distribution of overt subject raising in the history of English, it is claimed, extending Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulouʹs (1998) analysis of referential pro-drop languages like Greek and Spanish, that the “rich” verbal agreement of Old and Middle English, which is not rich enough to license referential pro-drop, serves to satisfy the EPP feature of T via overt verb raising, but not the ‘subject of predication’ feature of v. This enables us to account for the freer distribution of unaccusative subjects in Old and Middle English than in Present-day English, and to attribute their changing distribution to the loss of the “rich” verbal agreement in the sixteenth century.