Radical Pro Drop and Fusional Pronominal Morphology in Colloquial Singapore English: Reply to Neeleman and Szendrői

Abstract

1. Neeleman and Szendroi‟s (2007) Radical-Pro-Drop Generalization Neeleman and Szendroi (2007) (N&S) propose that Radical Pro Drop (RPD), namely, the liberal omission of any grammatical argument in languages like Chinese, requires agglutinating morphology on pronouns. N&S derive this generalization from three assumptions: a) null arguments are zero spell-outs of regular pronouns (Perlmutter 1971), b) spell-out rules for pronouns may target non-terminal nodes in the syntax (Weerman and Evers-Vermeul 2002) and c) the Elsewhere Principle (Kiparsky 1973) with its three notable features shown in (1a-c).