Null subjects, preproprial articles, and the syntactic structure of Old Norwegian pronouns

In Old Norwegian (ON), 1st and 2nd person null subjects (1/2 NS) are much rarer than 3rd person null subjects (3 NS). It has been suggested in recent work that 1/2 NS are ungrammatical and in fact do not exist in ON. According to this view, only 3rd person pronouns can be null subjects, because only they are not DPs (determiner phrases). For this latter claim to be true, ON cannot have preproprial articles, as this would indicate that 3rd person pronouns are DPs. This article presents ON data to demonstrate that the language has both 1/2 NS and preproprial articles. Since all ON personal pronouns appear to be DPs, there is little support for the purported difference in syntactic structure; thus, the observed asymmetry between 1/2 NS and 3 NS must have other, possibly extra-grammatical, causes.

[1]  J. Johannessen.  JUST ANY PRONOUND ANYWHERE ? PRONOUNS AND " NEW " DEMONSTRATIVES IN NORWEGIAN , 2006 .

[2]  Null arguments in Old Norwegian : Interaction between pronouns and functional domains , 2016 .

[3]  H. Hornich.  Logik der Forschung , 1936 .

[4]  H. Hughes.  The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , 2003 .

[5]  Marius Hægstad.  Vestnorske maalføre, fyre 1350 , 1908 .

[6]  Kristian A. Rusten.  A quantitative study of empty referential subjects in Old English prose and poetry , 2015 .

[7]  Gisella Ferraresi.  Word order and phrase structure in Gothic , 2005 .

[8]  Fahad Rashed Al-Mutairi.  The Minimalist Program: The minimalist program , 2014 .

[9]  J. Johannessen.  The pronominal psychological demonstrative in Scandinavian: Its syntax, semantics and pragmatics , 2008, Nordic Journal of Linguistics.

[10]  Elly Van Gelderen.  Null Subjects in Old English , 2013, Linguistic Inquiry.

[11]  Martina Wiltschko,et al.  Decomposing Pronouns , 2002, Linguistic Inquiry.

[12]  Halldor Armann Sigurðsson,et al.  The Icelandic Noun Phrase Central Traits , 2006 .

[13]  Stefan Einarsson,et al.  Icelandic Grammar, Texts, Glossary , 1946 .

[14]  Howard Lasnik.  The Theory of Principles and Parameters , 2014 .

[15]  Bjarne Ulvestad,et al.  Icelandic-Norwegian Linguistic Relationships , 1964 .

[16]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[17]  David Håkansson.  Null referential subjects in the history of Swedish , 2013 .

[18]  Kristian A. Rusten,et al.  Null Subjects in Early Icelandic , 2016, Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

[19]  Kari Kinn.  The cognitive status of null subject referents in Old Norse and their Modern Norwegian counterparts , 2014 .

[20]  Halldor Armann Sigurðsson,et al.  Argument-drop in old Icelandic , 1993 .

[21]  Richard Cleasby,et al.  An Icelandic-English Dictionary , 1874 .

[22]  J. Vries.  Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch , 1961 .

[23]  Lars-Olof Delsing,et al.  Syntaktisk variation i nordiska nominalfraser , 2003 .

[24]  David Fertig.  Null Subjects in Gothic , 2000 .

[25]  Joel Waldfogel,et al.  Introduction , 2010, Inf. Econ. Policy.

[26]  Höskuldur Thráinsson,et al.  The Syntax of Icelandic , 2007 .

[27]  Lars Heltoft.  Zero expression of arguments in Old Danish , 2012 .

[28]  Dennis Ott,et al.  Ellipsis in appositives , 2016 .

[29]  Jon Sprouse.  Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and Experimental Syntax , 2007, Biolinguistics.

[30]  Jan Terje Faarlund,et al.  The syntax of Old Norse , 2004 .