Deriving Null, Strong and Emphatic Pronouns in Romance Pro-Drop Languages

Abstract

It is well-known that overt subject pronouns in Romance Null Subject Languages display properties with respect to information structure and interpretation that set them apart from overt weak pronouns in a non-Null Subject Language like English. On the one hand, overt subject pronouns in a language like Spanish have been argued to be reluctant to occur in a bound construal in finite embedded contexts, as is expressed by Montalbetti’s (After binding. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984) Overt Pronoun Constraint. On the other hand, several studies indicate that the ban against a bound construal of overt pronominal forms is not categorical in focal or contrastive positions. Furthermore, overt pronominal forms can apparently be bound in certain complement control infinitives if they bear emphasis. This indicates that the bound/free alternation of subject pronouns in Romance Null Subject Languages is influenced by notions relating to information structure. In this paper, Spanish subject pronouns will be analyzed as ‘topic/focus morphemes’ which spell-out post-syntactically in combination with agreement features. In particular, it will be argued that null, strong, and emphatic pronouns enter the syntactic component lexically underspecified and are derived by entering dependencies with AGR as well as features relating to the pragmatic interface points v and C. The fact that overt realization of subject pronouns depends on [topic]/[focus] features in a Romance Pro-Drop Language like Spanish has the consequence that their referential construal is influenced by these features as well.