object shift in romance

this paper discusses the properties of vos sentences in romance and their bearing on case assignment, verb movement, parametric variation, and the structure of the vp periphery / low ip area. the literature on romance vos has argued that this order is derived either through object shift (ordóñez 1997, 1998, 2000) or vp fronting (belletti 2001, 2004; zubizarreta 1998), providing empirical evidence in support of both derivations. in this paper, i focus on various aspects of vos sentences in romance languages. first, i argue that both object shift and vp-fronting strategies are actually available, but subject to a very specific parametric cut: western romance languages (galician, european portuguese, and spanish) resort to object shift, whereas central-eastern varieties (catalan and italian) fail to do so, requiring the vp-fronting derivation instead (lópez 2009a). second, i put forward a previously unnoticed generalization that reveals that only those varieties licensing object shift based vos can generate vso sentences, which i refer to as the vos–vso generalization.