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Article published In:
Register Variation and Syntactic Theory
Edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell
[Linguistic Variation 17:2] 2017
► pp. 229–250

Unspeakable sentences

Subject omission in written registers: a cartographic analysis

| GIST/FWO, Ghent University

The empirical focus of this paper is register based subject omission in English. On the basis of a range of empirical data (including naturally occurring examples) the paper first dispels a number of common misconceptions about the phenomenon such as the idea that (i) this phenomenon is only restricted to diary style, (ii) only first person subjects can be omitted, (iii) the null subject is an instantiation of pro, (iv) the null subject is always uniquely identified in the context. The paper develops the cartographic analysis of register based subject omission proposed in Haegeman (2013) and based on Rizzi’s (2006b) ‘Privilege of the Root’ approach. A key ingredient of the analysis is the hypothesis that there is a specialized projection for the encoding of subjecthood (SubjP).

Keywords: register variation, subject omission, cartography, subject position, truncation, subject ellipsis in coordination
Article outline
  • 1.Starting point: when ungrammatical sentences become acceptable
  • 2.Register determined subject omission and subject omission in spoken English
  • 3.Some properties of WSO
    • 3.1The content of the null subject
    • 3.2Distributional restrictions
    • 3.3Subject omission in coordination
  • 4.What WSO is not
    • 4.1Pro drop
    • 4.2Topic drop (cf. Huang 1984, Raposo 1986)
  • 5.Cartography and structural truncation: defining the root
    • 5.1Spell out, the privilege of the root and truncation
    • 5.2SubjP as the root
      • 5.2.1WSO and adjuncts
      • 5.2.2Subject ellipsis in second conjuncts
  • 6.A comparative perspective
  • 7.Summary
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14019.hae
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