Sentential Subjects and Proper Government in Chamorro

The problems of representation posed by VSO languages arise in some form in every current syntactic theory. How is clause structure represented in these languages, what is its relationship to surface word order, and how does it differ (if at all) from the clause structure of languages such as English? One way of approaching these questions within Government-Binding Theory is to rephrase them as questions about the government properties of the subject. If the subject position in VSO languages could be shown to be properly governed, then there would be some reason for supposing that the clause has an S-structure different from that assumed for English: either a flat S-structure, as in (1a), or else an S-structure in which Infi supported by V (1b), or perhaps Infi alone (1c), properly governs the subject. (For discussion of the specifics of the structures shown below, see the works cited.)