Parallelism revisited

Previous research has argued that the null argument surfacing in ASL is comparable to its Spanish counterpart — agreement licensed pro (e.g. Rizzi 1986). This analysis has been applied to both subjects and objects of either all verb classes (Bahan et al. 2000) or agreeing verbs only (Lillo-Martin 1991). In this squib, I demonstrate that the nature of both the null subject and the null object in ASL does not neatly parallel that of Spanish, taken here to be a representative of consistent null subject languages (Biberauer et al. 2010).