The goal of this paper is to sketch a new way of accounting for the distribution of Spanish bare noun phrases(BNPs). BNPs are known to have a very restricted distribution: they are allowed to appear in postverbal subject position but not in preverbal subject position. In addition, if a phonetically realized element appears between BNPs and the verb, they are not allowed to appear even in postverbal subject position. We claim that these phenomena can be accounted for if we adopt two assumptions: (i) a lower copy may be phonetically realized if pronunciation of the head of the chain causes the derivation to crash at PF; (ii) BNPs are DPs with a null head, which is a PF-affix. In preverbal subject position the null D does not find a host to which it can be attached and thus fails to satisfy the Stranded Affix Filter, whereas in postverbal subject position it can be affixed to the verb under adjacency. This is why the distribution of BNPs is restricted to postverbal subject position. However, our analysis appears to face a problem since BNPs are disallowed in postverbal subject position when the verb is intransitive. In order to offer a way out of the problem we assume that intransitive verbs take a cognate object which is given a null phonetic spell-out at PF and then suggest that this cognate object prevents the null D from being affixed to the verb, causing the derivation to crash at PF.