Radical Pro Drop and the Morphology of Pronouns

Abstract

We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature. Other types of languages cannot omit pronouns freely, although they may have agreement-based pro drop. This generalization can for the most part be derived from three assumptions. (a) Spell-out rules for pronouns may target nonterminal categories. (b) Pro drop is zero spell-out (i.e., deletion) of regular pronouns. (c) Competition between spell-out rules is governed by the Elsewhere Principle. A full derivation relies on an acquisitional strategy motivated by the absence of negative evidence. We test our proposal using data from a sample of twenty languages and The World Atlas of Language Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005).

On the syntactically complex status of negative indefinites

“…Hence, rather than merging with an atomic object, the derivation is expanded with another syntactic structure, which is spelled out as kein, geen or no for German, Dutch, and English respectively (a standard case of morphological fusion resulting in suppletive forms) in much the same manner as has been proposed for pronouns (Weerman and Evers-Vermeul 2002;Neeleman and Szendrői 2007) and for wh-terms (Barbiers et al 2009). Now, the two problems immediately vanish: first, the fact that the complex structure corresponds to one phonological object follows straightforwardly; second, the fact that the relation between the negative operator and the indefinite is 1:1 follows as well: no object other than a syntactic structure consisting of those two nodes could be spelled out as kein/geen/no.…”

The syntax of anaphoric possessives in Hungarian

“…Pronouns that co-occur neither with NP-modifiers nor D spell out DP, while some pronouns spell out the entire KP (this gives rise to the subject vs. object pronoun distinction). Neeleman and Szendrői (2007) suggest that pronouns which are agglutinating for both number and case spell out NP, pronouns agglutinating only for case spell out DP, and pronouns fusional for number and case spell out KP. Both accounts derive the co-occurrence restrictions between pronouns and NP-modifiers/nominal affixes from the size of pronouns: the bigger structure the pronoun stands for, the more restricted its modification is.…”

“…Jackendoff (1977) proposes that English one corresponds toN, and Uriagereka (1995) and Corver and Delfitto (1999) suggest that clitic pronouns are D-elements that take a phonologically zero pro-NP complement. Weerman and Evers-Vermeul (2002) and Neeleman and Szendrői (2007) argue that overt and covert personal pronouns correspond to whole phrasal projections in several languages, and they derive the restricted modification of pronouns (as well as cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation thereof) from this assumption. Weerman and Evers-Vermeul (2002) argue that Dutch pronouns that cannot cooccur with DP-internal material such as numerals and adjectives but can co-occur with D spell out some projection between NP and DP.…”

“…Whatever the reason is, it is a fact that Hungarian pronouns strongly resist modification, and the presence of a pro-form in anaphoric possessives derives that modification is heavily restricted in this construction, too. 26 This can be modeled either as constituent spellout, like in Weerman and Evers-Vermeul (2002), Neeleman and Szendrői (2007), or as DM-style fusion of N and Poss, or as Nanosyntax-style 'spanning' of N and Poss. See Ramchand (2008), Svenonius (2012) for spanning analyses of vPs and PPs.…”

Argument structure and morphologically underived nouns in Spanish and English

“…One of them has to do with the technical implementation of phrasal spell out. There are different options in the literature to give an account of situations where one exponent spells out a series of heads: head-movement (Matushansky 2006), fusion as a post-syntactic operation (Halle & Marantz 1993;Embick & Noyer 2001), having lexical items correspond to subtrees (Starke 2009;McCawley 1968;Neeleman & Szendröi 2007;Weerman & Evers-Vermeul 2002;Caha 2009) or spanning (Ramchand 2008, Dékány 2012. The first approach cannot be adopted in our analysis, given the assumption that roots lack a grammatical category -which would make the fact that they have to move to check categorial features in the syntax surprising-but deciding between the three remaining approaches clearly requires more research.…”