Postverbal subjects in old Italo-Romance

In the V2 syntax of old Italo-Romance, subjects can both be preverbal and postverbal in topical or focal function, except for unaccusative sentence-focus structures, where they are consistently postverbal. The VS order of presentational Foci is also found in classical and late Latin and in modern Italo-Romance, suggesting that patient/undergoer subjects are invariably postverbal over time. In the sentence-focus structure of some northern vernaculars, we document the emergence of an expletive subject pronoun, which, we claim, spells out anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987, Bentley 2018) with an implicit spatiotemporal Topic. In the written domain this Topic recurrently surfaces in the form of spatio-temporal adverbials, which provide the logodeictic coordinates in which all-new information sentences are embedded in narratives. © 2018 Pacini Editore S.p.A.. All rights reserved.