In this paper, I tackle the question of the syntactic source of the clitic en in French, debated in the literature since the late 1970s (Kayne 1977 andMilner 1978). The aim is not only to find out what en pronominalizes but also to provide an analysis of nominal expressions able to account for (i) the quantitative, partitive, and genitive examples discussed by Milner (1978) and for (ii) the fact that du/des NPs can be replaced by en in some contexts only. What I suggest to account for the issues raised by en pronominalization is that quantitative nominals and du/des NPs have a unified structure that takes notions like number, quantity, and count/mass into account and that du/des NPs belong to different categories-that is, that their left periphery is composed differently. The idea is that, in addition to PPs, en can replace different layers of a nominal structure with an articulated left periphery and a fine-grained inflectional domain, in a cartographic spirit. The property underlying all uses of en could be their lack of referentiality, as observed by Gross (1973) for quantitative en.
This paper examines subject omission in English finite clauses. Contrary to what is claimed in Haegeman (1997), it is shown that embedded subject omission is attested in diary-style registers. These data pose a problem for the theory of empty categories in the Principles and Parameters framework. The main body of the paper describes the contexts in which subjects of embedded finite clauses are omitted. No syntactic constraints have been identified. Based on the observation that the omission of embedded subjects coincides with pronoun omission of reflexives, we tentatively suggest that in specific registers pronoun ellipsis is licensed by a specifier–head relation with a head carrying agreement features.
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