Making sense of silence: finiteness and the (OC) pro vs. pro distinction

Abstract

In this commentary paper, I discuss and further develop three points raised in Kissock (2013). First, I focus on Kissock’s proposal that all instances of null subject in Telugu are pro rather than OC pro. I argue that such a claim must be re-evaluated in light of the idea that (OC) pro and pro are not primitives: they both happen to be silent on the surface, but what crucially distinguishes them is that the former is always a bound-variable anaphor, whereas the latter can refer deictically. Thus, the claim that a language lacks OC pro reduces to a question about whether obligatorily bound variables are capable of being silent. The second part of the paper looks at whether there might be evidence for a lurking OC pro in Telugu after all. To this end, I take a closer look at complements embedded under the verb prajatninc- (roughly translated as “try”) and also investigate new evidence from clauses embedded under modalu- (“begin”), the latter showing that the subject of these clauses bears the classic fingerprint of OC pro. The third and final part of the paper expands on a minor point in Kissock’s paper involving non-finite clauses in Telugu, a subject pro-drop language, that allow both overt non-coreferent, and null coreferent subjects. Kissock assumes that the possibility of an overt non-coreferent subject automatically entails the possibility of a pro subject and argues, on this basis, that the null subjects in these clauses are pro, not pro. I propose that Kissock’s assumption is not an innocuous one to make and argue, on the strength of comparable examples from a range of languages, that subject pro-drop is restricted in non-finite clauses for independent reasons. Thus, the availability of an overt, non-coreferent subject in non-finite clauses doesn’t entail that of a pro subject.