Revisiting Variation Between Null Subject Languages

Download or read book Revisiting Variation Between Null Subject Languages written by Daniel Charles Greeson and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a micro-comparative approach within Romance null subject languages, I argue that cross-linguistic variation in the distributions of null subjects can be attributed to differences in the featural composition of overt subject pronouns. I use data from Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to show that more semantically and syntactically complex overt pronouns are restricted in their distributions when compared to less complex overt pronouns; as a result, pro-drop languages with highly restricted overt subject pronouns will omit these forms in favor of the null form more often. I will explain a number of interpretative and frequency-based contrasts associated with pronouns in both languages in terms of Schlenker (2005)'s pragmatic principle Minimize Restrictors!. I will show that this approach has an empirical advantage over the standard analyses of variation between null subject languages, which posit parameters in the inflectional domain that over-predict categorical syntactic differences in the availability of pro in different languages.