Tabea Ihsane

Adult Null Subjects in the non-pro-drop Languages: Two Diary Dialects

This article is concerned with subject omission in English diaries, a phenomenon that has often been taken to be the adult analogue of subject omission in child language. This hypothesis is based on the observation that, as is the case in subject omission in the child language, subject omission in the adult diary style is restricted to root contexts. We show that this restriction to root contexts is not absolute and that in recent British English, some varieties of diary style and of abbreviated registers do allow for embedded subject omission. We postulate that such data illustrate dialectal variation in the diary style. Further data suggest that diaries with embedded subject omission are more liberal with respect to pronoun ellipsis in other contexts (reflexives, coordination).

Subject ellipsis in embedded clauses in English

This paper examines subject omission in English finite clauses. Contrary to what is claimed in Haegeman (1997), it is shown that embedded subject omission is attested in diary-style registers. These data pose a problem for the theory of empty categories in the Principles and Parameters framework. The main body of the paper describes the contexts in which subjects of embedded finite clauses are omitted. No syntactic constraints have been identified. Based on the observation that the omission of embedded subjects coincides with pronoun omission of reflexives, we tentatively suggest that in specific registers pronoun ellipsis is licensed by a specifier–head relation with a head carrying agreement features.

The Layered DP: Form and meaning of French indefinites

This book examines argumental un -NPs and du/des -NPs in French: nominals with the indefinite article and with the so-called ‘partitive article’ respectively. The main aim is to account for the different interpretations of these indefinites and to determine how interpretation and structure are related. This study thus concerns the syntax-semantics interface, with an emphasis on the composition of the left periphery and the inflectional domain of the indefinites mentioned. It is realized in the framework of generative grammar and in a cartographic approach. A crucial proposal put forward in this book is that indefinites of different semantic types are associated with different left peripheries. The analysis further suggests that the inflectional domain of these indefinites may comprise three discrete functional projections encoding the features [count], [quantity] and [number]. Interestingly, these results seem to extend to a selection of bare nouns in Romance and Germanic languages.