Null objects, null nominal anaphora and antilogophoricity

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.