IP-Structure and pro in Polish

Abstract

In this paper I am going to argue that the morphosyntactic phenomenon of Inflected COMP in Polish provides evidence for separate Agr and Tense projections, and that the IP structure developed here licenses pro in Polish. An example of the inflected COMP sentence is the following: (1) a. Dopiero-śmy wsta - ły.; just-1PL get up-PAST/F/PL; 'We just got up.' Although usually the person marker is affixed to the main Verb, it is quite common for speakers to cliticize the person marker onto the first "word" of the sentence while the main Verb is inflected for past tense. This kind of a regular behaviour of the person marker against the past tense marker requires their separation in the tree. Another issue I am going to discuss here is the ordering of the Tense and Agr projections in the tree. I am going to take the position of Belletti (1988) and Chomsky (1988), and argue that the Agr projection is higher than Tense. This is supported by the morphological evidence of the ordering of the Tense and Agr markers on the Verb. (1) b. Dopiero wsta-ły-śmy.; just get up-PAST/F/PL-1PL; 'We just got up.' The assumption that the main Verb moves from V⁰ through Tense up to Agr and that this movement is reflected in the order of the markers on the Verb is consistent with the Mirror Principle which requires morphological derivations to directly reflect syntactic derivations (Baker (1985)). In order to account for the second position phenomena of the person marker with categories other than Verb I will propose that the Agr features adjoin to the C⁰ node and the person inflection on the first position in the sentence is a reflection of movement to COMP rather than movement to Agr. I am also going to use the adjunction of Agr to C⁰ as a quite natural explanation for pro in Polish. I will argue that after adjunction Agr is governing pro from Left to Right and since Agr is uniform (in the sense of Jaeggli and Safir (1989)) it can license pro in Polish.