The covert perceiver in English locative inversion

Abstract Locative Inversion (LI) in English is a broad-focus inversion structure in which a spatio-deictic XP seemingly occupies the canonical subject position. An analysis of LI must explain EPP-satisfaction: previous approaches take either a silent expletive pro ( Bruening, 2010 ; Coopmans, 1989 ; Postal, 2004 ) to value EPP or they consider the locative element to do so like expletive there . Indeed, LI resembles inversion under there , showing pragmatic, lexical-semantic, and syntactic restrictions, being limited mostly to unaccusatives of speaker-directed movement/orientation, while verbs of disappearance or change-of-state are largely unacceptable. However, unlike inversion under there , LI does not trigger definiteness effects which are associated with expletives. Moreover, LI is incompatible with negation, do -support and the present perfect. We propose that LI is an inherently evidential construction. This behaviour results from an EPP-satisfying logophoric covert perceiver argument dubbed Exp loc ( Sluckin, Cruschina & Martin, 2021 ) which provides an alternative to the typologically anomalous expletive pro . Exp loc moves from a vP-internal position scoping over a Small Clause to Spec,TP and is licensed only by contexts and verbs which can presuppose a perception event on the part of a perceiver. This explains previous observations that LI involves a visual experiential component ( Breivik, 1989 ; Brinton & Stein, 1995 ). Importantly, Exp loc derives known pragmatic and lexical-semantic restrictions on LI, e.g., no disappearance unaccusatives, negation (which negates a perceivable event), and the English present perfect which is infelicitous in reports of direct perception. Furthermore, we show that all unergative verbs participating in LI are coerced into an unaccusative structure.