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In linguistics, VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis (VPISH) is a hypothesis of syntactic structure proposed by researchers such as Fukui and Speas (1986), Kitagawa (1986) , Kuroda (1988) , and Koopman and Sportiche (1991) , which posits that the subject of a sentence is base-generated in the specifier position of VP (Spec-VP), instead of in Spec-IP.

Background
The VPISH was developed in the 1980s, in which linguistic theory was transitioning from PSR-based syntax to X-bar-based syntax put forth by Jackendoff (1977) and established by Chomsky (1981). Under the PSR, the structure of S(entence) is represented as below (Chomsky 1965:68) :


 * S → NP (Aux) VP

This reads "the constituent S consists of the subconstituents of an NP and a VP". It is important that the NP serves as a subject, and the VP as a predicate for it. The parsing rule indicates in addition that the subject of a sentence is located outside VP in PSR-based syntax, as schematized in Figure 1 (adapted from Chomsky 1965:65), and the same holds under the IP hypothesis put forth by Chomsky (1981, 1986) , as illustrated in Figure 2.



In the 1980s, a number of issues were pointed out concerning such an "external subject" structure.
 * 1) There is a lexical relation between the V and the subject, but the external configuration presumably does not meet the closeness requirement generally imposed on such relations. (Koopman and Sportiche 1991:213)