The Impact of Agreement on the Licensing of Null Arguments

The Impact of Agreement on the Licensing of Null Arguments

This paper attempts to illustrate the impact of agreement on the licensing of null arguments, especially on pro and argument ellipsis (henceforth AE) in Italian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian (henceforth SC) and Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC). Subject pros in agreement pro-drop languages like Italian and Turkish, and object pros in SC, are supposed to be licensed by subject or object-predicate agreement. By contrast, I argue, in radical pro-drop languages without agreement at all like MC, subject pro is licensed by discourse and context, along with the definiteness restriction on the pre-verbal subject position. Moreover, I further argue that invariant nominal gender prohibits the licensing of AE in SC, a NP language with rich agreement within Traditional Noun Phrase (henceforth TNP).