Toward a cartography of subject positions

This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on clause structure by discussing the distribution of subjects. In this paper, I concentrate on the preverbal subject field, where more than one subject position should be assumed. The properties attributed to preverbal subjects (being the subject of predication, checking the EPP feature, checking phi-features, checking nominative case) can be distributed across discrete functional projections each realizing a feature or a set of features. The preverbal subject field has the same properties in null-subject (NSLs) and non-null-subject languages (non-NSLs). The proposals according to which the preverbal subject of a NSL has a different status with respect to the subject in e.g. English is rejected. All subject positions are located in the IP-layer.