In defence of the Discourse Intention feature

This paper investigates sentence-focus VS structures in Spanish and Catalan. It is generally assumed that, in Romance languages, a covert element occupies the canonical preverbal position, preventing the subject from moving there. Previous theoretical analyses have proposed that this element is locative in nature, making the construction comparable to a locative inversion construction. In this paper, I review existing proposals in the literature and discuss their limitations. Building on Ojea (2017), I adopt and refine the idea that there is an EPP feature called Discourse Intention (DI), which sits in T in Spanish and can be valued by a locative feature available when the verb is in the perfective or progressive form. I suggest that this approach extends to Catalan and that, in addition to grammatical aspect, tense (specifically the present tense), plays a crucial role in the licensing of sentence-focus VS structures.