Abstract This paper discusses null objects (NOs) in Ibero-Romance. European Portuguese (EP) has both definite and indefinte NOs, but Castillian Spanish (CSpanish) only allows NOs when the antecedent is a bare plural nominal or a mass noun. The paper argues that these differences are related to the distribution of bare nominals in each language and proposes that the same underlying mechanism is at the root of indefinite and definite object drop, namely a rootless [ nP n ] proform. [ nP n ] denotes a contextually salient property, its possible interpretations being derived by general type-shifting operations. In CSpanish, the property denoted by [ nP n ] is interpreted as a restrictive modifier of the predicate and the relevant variable is bound under VP level Existential Closure. Focusing on EP, there are striking similarities between definite NOs and other types of nominal anaphora, including epithets. In particular, like epithets, NOs are subject to an Antilogophoricity Constraint. This affinity between NOs and epithets constitutes a case in favor of the idea that the NO is a base-generated nominal. The difference with respect to CSpanish lies in the possibility of interpreting the null nominal by a choice function, a function maps a property onto an entity that has the property.

Abstract Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564) and its revised version in Holmberg et al. (Holmberg, Anders, Aarti Nayudu & Michelle Sheehan. 2009. Three partial null-subject languages: A comparison of Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, and Marathi. Studia Linguistica 63(1). 59–97) derive the availability of null subjects in a given language from the interaction between T with/without a D(efiniteness)-feature and the features of subject pronouns. Their theory predicts the existence of consistent null subject languages, whose T has the D-feature, and partial null subject languages, whose T lacks the D-feature. This paper examines this D-feature approach to null subjects against the empirical evidence provided by Brazilian Portuguese, a partial null subject language, and European Portuguese, a consistent null subject language, showing that it cannot account for the range of microvariation observed with respect to different null subject pronouns and the type of T (finite vs. participle vs. gerund). We argue that, in comparison, the ellipsis account of null subject licensing put forward in Martins and Nunes (Martins, Ana Maria & Jairo Nunes. 2021. Brazilian and European Portuguese and Holmberg’s 2005 typology of null subject languages. In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen & Luisa Meroni (eds.), Romance languages and linguistic theory 2018. Selected papers from “Going Romance” 32, Utrecht, 171–190. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins) fares better. It retains from Holmberg (Holmberg, Anders. 2005. Is there a little pro? Evidence from Finnish. Linguistic Inquiry 36(4). 533–564 et seq.) the insight that the licensing of null subjects depends on the interaction between the features of T and the features of subject pronouns but resorts only to ϕ-features and Case. Crucially, it relies on the (theoretically and empirically) plausible assumption that the relation between abstract ϕ-features and verbal agreement morphology need not be transparent.

Abstract Focusing mostly on European Portuguese, this paper proposes that the internal syntax of Portuguese gerund clauses and the gradience in their degree of defectiveness may be explained by an interplay between their external syntax (locus of merge), agreement relations between embedded Tense and matrix Tense and the presence/absence of an intervening head. We first revisit the distinction between peripheral adverbial gerund clauses and central adverbial gerund clauses and show that their internal syntax correlates with their external syntax: central adverbial gerund clauses are merged in lower positions and appear to be more defective. We derive their defectiveness from the agree relation established between embedded T and matrix T. We then consider predicative gerund clauses and show that they are even more defective and restricted in their aspectual value, lacking a T head. Finally, we consider predicative gerund clauses introduced by como ‘as’ and show that, although they are merged in a low position, they are less defective than central adverbial gerund clauses. We attribute this mismatch between the internal and external syntax of this specific type of gerund clause to the presence of the Predicate head como, which intervenes between matrix T and embedded T and blocks the agreement relation.

Abstract This article raises the hypothesis that 3rd person, accusative o/a (“him/her”) and dative lhe (“to him”/ “to her”) clitics, as well as the indefinite clitic se (“one”), contrary to 1st and 2nd person me/te (“me/you”), were never part of the grammar of the populations who acquired Portuguese as L2 in Brazil; rather, 3rd person clitic pronouns have been learned by a small number of Brazilians with school access (0.5 %), in the beginning of the 19th century. To bring support to this hypothesis, socio-historical information is presented, according to which, during about 350 years of colonization, slaved Africans and their descendants constituted the largest part of the population; their contact with several waves of Portuguese immigrant workers contributed to the emergence of Brazilian dialects differing in many aspects from European Portuguese (EP). Data from European and Brazilian Portuguese (PB) popular theater plays, written across the 19th and the 20th centuries, show that EP exhibits a robust and stable system of 3rd person accusative and dative clitics, contrary to BP. Analyses of recorded EP and BP since the 1970s attest the extremely rare use of such clitics in BP, very close to the percentages shown in the more recent plays, whereas formal writing reveals the school relative success in the effort to teach 3rd person clitics.

Abstract This paper offers a new characterization of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP). I contend that the NSP must be modeled referring to two main properties of the Agree/agreement systems: (i) presence/absence of abstract Agree, and (ii) presence/absence of agreement dissociation at PF. The first property results in the division between radical argument ellipsis languages of the Japanese type and consistent null subject languages of the Spanish type, including languages like Central Trentino, i.e., languages with some obligatory clitic subjects but with rich agreement and free inversion. The second property results in the division between consistent null subject languages and consistent non-null subject ones. The agreement dissociation hypothesis also accounts for the partial null subject type, which characterizes languages like Brazilian Portuguese that have impoverished agreement expansion at PF (perhaps, only for number features). From a theoretical point of view, this study focuses on the agreement dissociation property showing why abstract Agree cannot guarantee subject ellipsis even in those perplexing cases in which it produces enough agreement distinctions at PF. The reason is that only an expanded agreement morpheme adjoined to the T0 node can serve as a licit antecedent for ellipsis of a subject D0 head at PF. Therefore, the theory derives the bimorphemic principle in Koeneman and Zeijlstra (Koeneman, Olaf & Hedde Zeijlstra. 2021. Pro-drop and the morphological structure of inflection. Ms. Available at: https://www.heddezeijlstra.org/bio) without further ado, i.e., the observation that null subject properties correlate with a bimorphemic T0 node expressing tense and agreement separately.

Abstract In Spanish lexical compounds, stress on the final constituent is consistently preserved; however, it is uncertain whether stress on the initial constituent is preserved as well. Some linguists claim that stress is deleted from the initial constituent, whereas a few argue, instead, that it is demoted from primary to secondary. Given that empirical evidence has been scarce, this issue remains unresolved. To inform the debate, the present study examines all known phonetic correlates of stress in both accented and unaccented contexts. The acoustic measures of lexical compounds are compared to those of non-compound words and phrases that have a similar segmental structure. The results demonstrate that the initial constituent of lexical compounds bears secondary stress. This secondary stress, as a result of stress demotion, differs from rhetorical secondary stress both phonetically and phonologically. These findings provide fresh insights into the definitional properties as well as the prosodic structure of Spanish compounds.