The fine structure of the left periphery: COMPs and subjects: Evidence from Romance

This article explores the characteristics and syntactic behaviour of a peculiar construction in which what seem to be two finite complementisers are allowed to co-occur in specific subordinate clauses. As well as providing a detailed description of the structure in a number of Romance varieties, this research focuses on the different roles played by items belonging to the category traditionally labelled as COMP and on the status of the subjects found in the left periphery. Adopting the so-called split-CP hypothesis the proposed analysis argues for the expression of both discourse and inflectional features at the C level, overtly realised as distinct heads, and claims that there are both topicalised and focalised positions available to pre-verbal subjects in the left periphery, be they a DP or a quantified element.