Topic prominence and null subjects

Modesto, Marcello

doi:10.1075/la.132.17mod

In:The Limits of Syntactic Variation
Edited by Theresa Biberauer
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 132] 2008
► pp. 375–409

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Topic prominence and null subjects

Marcello Modesto

Published online: 17 September 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/la.132.17mod

This chapter presents data from Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish and Chinese

which show that, at least in these languages, phonologically null subjects may be

licensed and identified without the participation of verbal agreement. The analysis

proposed treats those cases of null subjects as elided topics (PF-deleted elements)

and so it relates the presence of null subjects in these languages to a parameter

involving topic prominence. Some implications of the analysis are then discussed,

based on Brazilian Portuguese data.

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