Regular article
Null arguments in old Norwegian
Interaction between pronouns and the functional categories of the
clause
In this paper I propose a new analysis of null arguments in Old Norwegian. I
argue that the option of null realization in Old Norwegian correlates with a
distinction between φP and DP pronouns in the sense of Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002), and that this
distribution can be captured by a version of pronoun deletion (Roberts 2010b). On a more general,
theoretical level, I argue that both the structure of pronouns and that of the
functional domains C, T and v influence the null argument properties of a
language. Thus, null arguments, but also blocking of null
arguments in non-null-argument languages like Modern Norwegian and English, may
be derived in different ways.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Old Norwegian: definition and data
-
3.Principles of excerption
- 3.1Extracting null arguments
- 3.2One or more types of null arguments?
-
3.3The position of null arguments and rendering of linguistic examples
- 4.Null arguments in Old Norwegian: empirical observations
- 4.1Syntactic environments
- 4.2Clause type
- 4.3Person features
-
5.A syntactic analysis: only φPs can be deleted
- 5.1The framework of Déchaine & Wiltschko
(2002)
- 5.2Pronouns in Old Norwegian
- 5.2.11st and 2nd person pronouns as DPs
- 5.2.23rd person pronouns as φPs
-
5.3Derivation of null pronouns: the deletion analysis of Roberts (2010b)
-
5.4Deletion in Old Norwegian
- 6.Some cross-linguistic perspectives
-
6.1Old Norwegian vs. Modern Norwegian
- 6.2Old Norwegian vs. English
- 6.3Old Norwegian vs. other early Germanic languages
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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