Empty Subjects in Finnish and Hebrew

Finnish and Hebrew (in most tenses) share an unusual mixed subject omission pattern: the subject NP is optional in the first and second person but is generally required in the third person. A unified analysis of the two languages is developed in this paper, using certain proposals of Minimalism and a licensing principle which requires that both the specifier and the head position of a projection must be filled. In addition to the null subject pattern, Finnish and Hebrew differ both from traditional pro-drop and from non- pro-drop languages in the patterning of the agreement paradigm; the analysis developed here provides a connection between the mixed null subject pattern and the special agreement paradigm.

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