Do Null Subjects (mis-)Trigger Pro-drop Grammars?

When pro pro Pro-drop Languages Don't: on Overt Pronominal Subjects in Greek

Pro-Drop and Impoverishment

It is often assumed that some notion of morphological richness plays a central role in the theory of pro-drop: In languages with sufficiently rich verbal φ-feature (person, number, gender) agreement morphology, pronominal arguments can (and, in some contexts, must) remain without phonological realization; in languages without such a rich verbal agreement morphology, pronominal arguments must be...

Child Null Subjects*

It has often been observed that children go through a stage in their language development where they omit subjects. This occurs in children learning both pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages and poses questions for a traditional parameter-based theory of language acquisition. In this paper I give an overview of some of the existing accounts of this phenomenon, considering the patterns that emerg...

Early operators and late topic-drop/pro-drop

This paper compares two reduction principles in child language, Tense/Agreement Omission (Schütze 1997, Wexler 1998) and Root Peripheral Truncation (Rizzi 1994, 2001). The paper argues that the empirical content of these proposals as well as their partial overlap follows from an inherent hierarchy of acquisition steps of the kind predicted in Jakobson (1942). The empirical support for this rein...

When Pro - Drop Languages Don ’ t : Overt Pronominal Subjects and Pragmatic Inference

In a language that allows null pronouns, why would a speaker bother to use an overt pronoun at all? A traditional answer is that an overt pronoun contains agreement information necessary for the identification of its antecedent. But this cannot possibly be the answer in languages like Turkish, which has subject-verb agreement, but no gender; since the verb already indicates the person and numbe...