Abstract for Ivona Kucerova's talk

Syntactic restrictions on null subject licensing
Ivona Kucerova (University College, London)
October 28, 2008 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

I argue that grammatical licensing of null subjects (NS) in the sense of identification and/or recoverability (regardless of whether the NS is referential pro, PRO, or a bound variable; Chomsky 1981, 1982; Rizzi 1986; Jaeggli and Safir 1989; Borer 1986; Landau 2004; Holmberg 2005, among others) is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a NS to be grammatical. I will show that contrary to the widely held assumptions pro does not move to Spec,TP, thus it cannot satisfy an EPP-like requirement. For a structure containing a NS to be grammatical, some syntactic material other than the subject must satisfy the extension requirement. If this is correct, we expect to find languages where NSs are grammatical only in some syntactic environments but not in others, regardless of the recoverability of the NS. Such languages are indeed attested.