This article advances two main claims. First, it argues that [Spec, VP], the base position of the external argument, is right-branching in French. It is shown that some surprising restrictions imposed on the order of complements in stylistic inversion can then be interpreted in terms of an adjacency condition restricting the occurrence of lexical material between the postverbal subject and its Case checker. Second, it asserts that [Spec, IP], the derived subject position, is occupied by a null expletive, pro. The limited distribution of the construction then follows from the licensing conditions governing the null expletive in French. Further, the proposed analysis sketches a possible interpretation of adjacency phenomena and of the notion of expletives within recent developments of generative grammar.

When words are borrowed from one language into another, they are often adapted to conform with the phonological constraints of the borrowing language. This article looks at the adaptation of six hundred loanwords from French and English into Lama in light of the predictions of the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies. The Lama data support the Minimality Principle, which predicts that ill-formed structures will be repaired as economically as possible, and the Preservation Principle, which predicts that epenthesis will be favoured over deletion. They also support the claim that the form in which loanwords are stored in the borrowing language is equivalent to the output of the phonology of the source language, even when that includes segments which are ill-formed in the borrowing language. However, the Lama data do not support the Threshold Principle, which predicts deletion when adaptation would be too costly.