Two kinds of subject pro

• Main Author: Barbosa, Pilar
• Publication Date: 2009
• Format: Article
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/6458
• topic: Partial pro-drop; Consistent pro-drop; Romance syntax; European portuguese; Brazilian portuguese; Social Sciences

This paper discusses evidence that reinforces previous proposals (Barbosa 1995, 2000, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998, Pollock 1997, Kato 1999) that there is no EPP feature driven subject movement to pre-verbal position in the Romance consistent Null Subject Languages (NSL). The paper argues that this property distinguishes European Portuguese (EP), a consistent NSL, not only from the non-NSLs (French or English) but also from a closely related partial pro-drop language such as Brazilian Portuguese (BP). In line with a long tradition of research on the topic, the absence of EPP feature driven XP movement to Spec-TP is attributed to properties of "rich" agreement morphology. The paper develops an analysis of this phenomenon within the Agree based framework of Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2005) as modified in Pesetsky & Torrego (2004a, b). In the analysis proposed here, pro is a minimally specified nominal whose unvalued phi-features are valued in the course of the derivation. Another consequence of this paper concerns partial pro-drop. The analysis of pro proposed here for the consistent NSLs doesn't apply to the null subject in BP. In fact, our conclusion that subjects raise in BP may be seen as indirect confirmation of Holmberg's findings regarding null subjects in Finnish where there is clear evidence for raising. Consequently, the null subject found in the consistent NSLs is of a different kind from that found in partial pro-drop languages, such as BP or Finnish.