Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

option in 0.c), because the AGR-morphology, with the help of AGR-clitics, makes AGR o rich
enough (with at least 5 distinctions). But then these dialects use AGR-morphology+clitics in a
parsimonious way: they use all 6 distinctions to abide by 0 when the I-subject is null (a null
pronominal), but they use only 5 distinctions when the I-subject is overt.
The fact that inverted subjects seem to require Person features (except for the special
Case of French Stylistic Inversion), does not support Rizzi's (1986) view that expletives only
require formal licensing (not feature identification), if, in consonance with Rizzi's view, subject
inversion involved an expletive. In fact, Rizzi considers three levels of feature requirements for
pro: person and number (referential pro), only number (quasi-Argument pro) and no requirement
(expletive pro). We see, however, that:
- subject inversion requires person features (and in some languages even number). We
propose that there is no expletive involved.
- null 'there'-expletives require number (e.g. Brazilian, German) or no feature,
depending on the language (see section 3.2.).
- null 'it-CP' expletives do not apparently require features (at least in V-governed
position, see Rizzi (1986)), but
- both null 'it-CP' expletives and null 'there'-expletives (and quasi-Arguments) seem to
be favored in in non-NSLs at least distinguishing 3rd singular from 3rd plural (Brazilian
Portuguese, Icelandic, German). So it seems that number features are important to licence null
expletives.
So Rizzi's three-level distinction appears not to be straightforwardly confirmed by
cross-linguistic evidence.
One tentative alternative proposal could be the following:
a) Null there-expletives do not exist in NSLs.
b) Null there-expletives require number features (i.e., a morphological distinction
between 3rd-sng and 3rd-pl) (German, Brazilian Portuguese, Icelandic).
c) Null Quasi-Arguments require number features and some additional condition
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