ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a number of issues involving the clausal structure of Romance with special emphasis on Spanish. The analysis of sentences with preverbal subjects aie crucial in understanding Romance clausal structure. The core of antisymmetry is the unification of the two fundamental dimensions of syntax: hierarchical structure and linear ordering of the constituents of a sentence. As a consequence, antisymmetry is more restrictive than previous approaches to syntactic analysis in terms of the theoretical apparatus allowed. Richard Kayne shows that this way of conceiving UG is too permissive; natural languages are less symmetrical than this pattern predicts. One asymmetry involves the position of the specifiers in phrase structure. Because complements may appear either before or after the head, it might be expected that the specifier would be capable of a similar mirror-image pattern. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
