Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives.

Division of Labor in the Interpretation of Declaratives and Interrogatives

This paper presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives, and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives an...

On the semantics and logic of declaratives and interrogatives

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear sy...

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...

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