The goal of this paper is to provide novel theoretical and empirical evidence that the null subjects traditionally labelled as pro and PRO, rather than being
inherently distinct, are manifestations, differentiated in the course of the derivation, of what is underlyingly a single underspecified nominal pro-form, which
we will call UPro. Included under this UPro are pro, OC PRO and also the various
types of ‘non-obligatory control’ (NOC) PRO, including arbitrary PRO (PROarb). The
interpretive and distributional distinctions lurking behind these labels result from
how UPro interacts with its structural environment and language-specific rules
of morpho-phonological realization. Specifically, OC PRO labels a rather specific
interpretation that arises in embedding contexts where a syntactic OC relationship with an antecedent can be established. Different types of pro and NOC PRO, on
the other hand, involve ‘control’ by (typically) silent representations of discourse contextual elements in the clausal left periphery. Finally, PROarb arguably involves
the failure to establish a referential dependence, which we will formalize in terms
of a failure to Agree in the sense of Preminger (2014). Crucial evidence motivating the approach proposed here will be adduced from Sundaresan’s (2014)
“Finiteness pro-drop Generalisation”, which reveals an otherwise unexpected
complementarity of OC PRO and pro.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:83423 |
| Date | 07 February 2023 |
| Creators | McFadden, Thomas, Sundaresan, Sandhya |
| Publisher | De Gruyter |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 0167-6318 |
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