Case morphology and radical pro-drop

This paper focuses on the so-called discourse pro-drop languages,

i.e., those permitting radical pro-drop, which affects not just subjects,

but other pronominal arguments too. Whereas previous attempts to

understand the properties of these languages have focused on verbal

agreement, the proposal here is that it is in fact the properties of the

pronominal paradigm that determine the availability or otherwise of

radical pro-drop. In particular, we propose that radical pro-drop will

only be possible in languages with “transparent” (i.e., non-fusional)

pronominal paradigms, since pro-drop falls out as the consequence

of the zero spell-out of regular pronouns. On the empirical front, we

show that investigation of a wide range of languages would seem to

confirm our prediction.

Published online: 17 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.132.14nee