1Subjects, Expletives, and the EPP

The literature on the three concepts named in the title of this book is vast. In this introduction, I simply provide a sketch (in §1.1-1.3) of the issues that set the scene for the papers in the volume. My discussion is judiciously larded at appropriate points with brief references to those papers, and each paper is summarized in §1.4. In §1.5, I discuss the papers in relation to each other, and then summarize some of their shared assumptions. 1.1. Subjects The subject occupies a precarious position in generative linguistics; on the one hand it is an indispensable concept at a descriptive level, and is accorded basic sta-tus as a primitive notion in some frameworks (along with other grammatical rela-tions); on the other hand it has defeated all attempts at a cross-linguistically valid definition and a substantial part of the field takes it to be no more than a descrip-tive label for an epiphenomenal collection of properties (cf. McCloskey 1997 for a clear overview of the issues). Traditional grammarians distinguish between grammatical or formal subject