• Language and Information
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.85-105
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• 2005

This study aims at investigating the 'verb-second' phenomena indicated in complex sentences of medieval Spanish. Especially, when the complex sentence is composed of a preposed adverbial clause and its succeeding main clause, the subject inversion is noticeable in the latter. The fundamental motive of this type of inversion is due to the 'verb-second' structure, in which a topic appears in the first position and the verb immediately after the topic. So it can be said that the subject inversion is a prerequisite for a verb to be located in the second position when the adverbial clause functions as a topic to the main clause, as is often the case with Germanic languages like German, Dutch, etc.. On the contrary, modern Spanish complex sentences do not show this phenomenon, with a strong tendency to locate a grammatical subject in the preverbal position. Therefore, medieval Spanish might be typologically closer to Germanic languages than to modern Spanish. In order to argue for this assumption, the formal and functional criteria by which the preposed adverbial clause could be defined as a topic NP will be examined across the comparition with left-dislocation structure.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.9 no.spc
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• pp.131-148
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• 2003

This paper, conducted within the GB framework, investigates inversion phenomena in the functional categories, Focalization Phrases and Topicalization Phrases. The leading idea of this paper is that formal feature checking in these two functional categories is mostly responsible for inversion in which either verb or auxiliary verbs appear in front of subjects and also it will try to find an answer to the following questions: "What are the features that trigger the inversion?" and "Can all the inversion constructions explained by Haegeman's Focalization & Topicalization?" My discussion is largely based on English inversion constructions such as wh-inversion, negative inversion, and adverbial inversion. Also I will show there are some problems in Topicalization and Focalization analysis to explain some inversion constructions and present Rizzi(1999)'s analysis for those problems.