Null subjects: a reanalysis of the data

Abstract

In the face of problems with previous syntactic theories, this article establishes a new concept relating to the incidence of null thematic pronouns, focusing on null thematic subjects. The data indicate that, in rich agreement languages with null subjects, prima facie, recovery of such subjects is achieved first by reference to discrete agreement and, if this fails, by reference to an antecedent in context. Subsequently, preferred interpretations are resorted to and then overt pronouns. The argument is developed to show that every language has its point of morphological maximality. This is the maximum point up to which identifying subject verb agreement can occur in a language and this level of verbal agreement must be present for thematic subjects to be null. This point is scalar, being represented by morphology for gender, person and number in Tarifit, for person and number in Spanish, for person in Bengal and null morphology in Chinese. A further necessary feature for thematic null subjects to occur is that an antecedent in context completes their recovery. Whether this occurs or not is put down to the contextual weakness and strength of languages. This theory has the consequence that the licensing of thematic subjects is redundant and that null expletive subjects need to be treated as a separate empty category.