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(which is met by Brazilian Portuguese and Icelandic but not by German).
d) Subject inversion requires person features (in our technical terms, AGR o can be the
AGR-identifier only if it is rich in person features).
e) Referential pro requires number and person.
This is only a tentative approach, conceived solely on the basis of finite clauses. For
infinitival clauses, see next chapter. What the present approach shares with Rizzi's (1986)
proposal about null pronominals is the idea that, beyond requirements on formal licencing,
empty pronominals are subject to requirements on recovery of content, which can be more or less
stringent (even possibly vacuous) depending on the nature of the pronominal. We propose,
however, a reduction of the empty pronominals available.
French does not fit into the theory yet: in [-assertive] contexts, where overt [-anaphoric]
I-subjects are allowed, it is not the case that 5 distinctions are provided by the verbal morphology
(and subject clitics cannot be used, because they are not AGR-clitics, but merely phonological
clitics). I cannot provide an account for this fact. Two possibilities could be pursued:
- French Stylistic Inversion is some marked option in which 0.b) is relaxed.
- 0.b) should be relaxed for all languages, so that AGR o can in principle be the AGR-
identifier in French (and a fortiori in Northern Italian dialects and other Romance NSLs) but not
in English or Germanic Languages, where not even [-assertive] sentences allow subject
inversion.
All the preceding proposals in this section are highly speculative and only tentative. For
convenience, I will continue to use 0 in the remainder of the discussion.
There are, in addition, some remaining problems which appear to be even harder to
account for within the hypotheses advanced here. One is Old French, where Null Subjects and
Subject Inversion are restricted to V-second contexts, i.e., root contexts for the most part (see
Adams (1987)). The other is Corsican: in spite of the fact that this language has rich AGR
morphology, it only behaves like Italian in root contexts. In embedded contexts a subject clitic is
1