A minimalist approach to the landing site of Persian topics

The present paper compares and contrasts two split CP hypotheses with regard to topicalization in Persian. While the two hypotheses posit a focus phrase (FocP) and a topic phrase (TopP) as two functional projections that serve as the landing sites for scrambled constituents, there are two major differences between the two proposals. First, though Karimi (2002) takes the Spec of TopP as the landing site for what she calls shifted topics, she takes Spect of TP as an A ́-position in which background topics may land. However, this position is the familiar subject position for Haegeman and Gueron (1999). Second, while there are two topic projections between TP and CP in Haegeman and Gueron’s proposal; one above FocP and a recursive one between TP and FocP, there is only one TopP in Karimi’s (2005) proposal. We provide evidence from scrambled non-specific constituents in constructions involving a focussed phrase and the agreement relation between the scrambled constituent and the verb to support Haegeman and Gueron's view of the split CP hypothesis.