Spanish and Portuguese parallels

Revisiting the Null Subject Parameter: New Insights from Afro-Peruvian Spanish

“…Thus, the agreement operation will not target such features of the pronoun. The system leads to default (third person singular) values of the goal (Sessarego & Ferreira 2016 Along the same lines of reasoning, the alternation between non-emphatic overt subjects and null subjects may be explained as the result of a different selection of overt pronominal categories, which may or may not contain a [+topic shift] feature (cf. Grimshaw & Samek-Lodovici 1998), thus leading to constructions like (20), which would sound pragmatically odd in standard Spanish.…”