Movement of Null Determiner in English Clausal Complement

This paper aims to investigate the derivation of pleonastic it out of the clausal complement in English. The derivation is correlated with the so called sentential subject constructions, so we will first review issues on movement of the clausal complement found in the previous literature, and discuss the distribution of it. The previous literature has observed two empirical facts for sentential subject: 1) the distribution of sentential subject appears to be correlated with the availability of DPs in the complement of the predicate, and 2) the sentential subject occupies on the left periphery - i.e. a topic position -and a null pro occupies SpecTP. To account for the facts, the previous literature suggests that a null determiner merges to the clausal complement prior to topicalization. The null determiner bears an uninterpretable feature that can be checked off by the topic head, which in turn implies that all clausal movement involves a null determiner. Based on the findings that the previous accounts have made, I propose that the morphological composition of pleonastic it is not uniform in English, and that the null determiner can be topicalized out of the clausal complement and morphologically realized as it.