Null Subjects in Slavic and Finno-Ugric

Licensing, Structure and Typology

Gréte Dalmi, Egor Tsedryk, Piotr Cegłowski, Gréte Dalmi, Egor Tsedryk, Piotr Cegłowski

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501513916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Syntax in Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Even though null subjects have been extensively studied in the past four decades, there is a growing interest in partial null subject languages (e.g. Finnish) and a subtler classification of null subject phenomena overall. This volume aims at contributing to this trend, focusing on Slavic and Finno-Ugric groups, with some extension to Baltic and Samoyedic languages. Interestingly, these groups offer an impressive array of macro- and microvariation. Moreover, given an increasing interest towards the internal structure of the pronominal elements and the role of various types of topics in the left periphery of the sentence structure, the enterprise taken up in this book is to investigate lexical and null, referential and generic subjects in order to understand and compare their feature composition, licensing conditions, and structural properties. Rather than trying to squeeze the studied languages into a predefined set of parameters, this volume highlights some properties that may lead to a refinement of the existing generalizations. It brings together contributors from both generative and typological traditions and will be of interest to any researcher willing to investigate argument-drop in a wider crosslinguistic perspective.

1 Pro subject(ed) to challenge: The concept of the null subject and typologies of Null Subject Languages

Jacek Witkoś

1 Introduction: pro enters the stage

In the Principles & Parameters framework, null subjects in finite clauses were particularly interesting from a cross-linguistic perspective, as they seemed to be attributable to a single parameter separating Null Subject Languages (NSLs), such as Italian and Spanish, from non-NSLs, which require lexical or pronominal subjects (e.g., English and French). This view was in part driven by early attempts to identify a set of properties that characterize NSLs (Taraldsen 1980; Rizzi 1982) and the subsequent attempt to offer a generalized theory of null pronouns, so-called “little pro’s”, in both subject and object positions (Rizzi 1986). The theory was subsequently extended to “impersonal sentences” and “non-referential” instances of null arguments, the so-called “arbitrary pro” (Cinque 1988; Cabredo-Hofherr 2003). Furthermore, it has been shown that in addition to purely formal means to license null subjects (i.e. verbal agreement), grammar may also resort to discursive means (e.g., topicalization) that play a crucial role in “radical pro-drop” languages such as Japanese and Chinese (Huang 1984, 1989). These early attempts triggered an unprecedented interest in null arguments across languages. Subsequent research has shown that null subject phenomena are not reducible to a single parameter.

The original Null Subject Parameter was formulated in Rizzi (1982: 142) and involved a set of two parametric options:

(1)

The Null Subject Parameter

a.

INFL can be specified [+pronoun].

b.

INFL which is [+pronoun] can be referential.

The parametric option in (1a) distinguishes between non-NSLs (e.g., English, French, Swedish), so languages that force lexicalisation of pronouns in the subject position under all syntactic and morphosyntactic circumstances: referential, impersonal, expletive, etc., and languages that admit the option of dropping the subject pronoun (e.g., Greek, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.). Parameter (1b) distinguishes between NSLs that allow for the drop of only non-referential (expletive) or quasi-referential (subject of weather predicates) subject pronouns and the ones that license null subjects referring to both referential and non-referential nominals.

As an empty category, pro fits well with the then classical paradigm of (nominal) empty categories presented in Chomsky (1982):

(2)

The GB paradigm of empty categories

	pronominal	anaphoric
PRO	+	+
pro	+	–
NP-trace	–	+
variable	–	–

With empirical studies of different NSLs accumulating, the definition of the parameter changed accordingly:

(3)

Null Subject Parameter (Rizzi 1986: 518–523)

a.

pro must be licensed

Licensing: pro is case-marked by X°_y, where y is parametrized.

b.

pro must be identified

Identification: pro inherits the φ-feature values of X°_y (if it has φ-features; if not, pro gets a default interpretation, typically arb).

On the strength of (3), null pronouns could come in two types (Rizzi 1986: 543):

(4)

a.

An NP is referential only if it has the specification of person and number.

b.

An NP is argumental only if it has the specification of number.

These two types are not independent from each other but they form a hierarchy and a set/subset relationship: the set of all argumental pros is specified for number and a subset of this set is additionally specified for person. Rizzi’s identification is equivalent to today’s feature valuation: T values the φ-features of pro. In the structure in (5), pro is formally licensed by T, assuming that T be...