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 number of the subject, overt pronominal subjects contain no more agreement information than null subjects; yet overt subject pronouns are common in Turkish. Even in languages where the overt pronoun does carry additional agreement features, it is frequently used in situations where the potential antecedents cannot be differentiated through agreement features. Nevertheless, overt pronouns are far from redundant or “optional,” as traditional grammar would have it. Even in the absence of any contrast in agreement features, an overt pronoun can be interpreted differently from a null pronoun. In the following example from Greek, both of the possible antecedents are singular, masculine, and in the third-person. But the null pronoun in (c) must pick out the subject of the previous sentence, Arisi, while the overt pronoun in (c0) must pick out the object, Gianisk .