The possibility ofnull subjects in a language has been attributed to the pronominal character ofits Agreement morphology. Instead ofconsidenng a pronominal INFL äs the licenserand/oridentifierofthe empty pronoun pro, Iwül analyze the Agreement morphemes äs independent D items in the numeration, containing case and -features. They are merged with verbs inflectedfor tense äs their external arguments. Attracted to T by its strong D-feature, Agreement raises to T, checking its case and -features. As a consequence Spec of T is not projected. Lexical subjects and strong pronouns are in a higher projection, where they get a "default" nominative case. Non-pronominal Agreement languages will have weak pronouns merged with a fully inflected verb and will exhibit subject pronouns doubled by a strong pronoun, a phenomenon not visible when the subject is the Agreement itself. The empirical evidence ofthis analysis will be provided by the diachronic factsfrom Old French and Modern Brazilian Poriuguese, which show that the loss ofnull referential subjects correlates with the impoverishment of person distinc· tions in their Agreement System and with the emergence of a paradigm of weak pronominals. The analysis also suggests how to analyze null subjects in emerging grammars. 1. This is a modified and expanded version of Kato (1995a), Kato (1996) and Kalo (1997). I thank all the people who read one of these earlier versions or helped me with criticisms in the meetings where I presented them. Special thanks go to Maria Luiza Zubizarreta, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Joseph Aoun, and Marcelo Modesto, who gave me valuable feedback on this project during my sabbatical at USC and U California, Santa Barbara, in 1996.1 also thank GianPaolo Salvi, Georg Kaiser and Jürgen Meisel for their valuable comments on the almost final version of this paper (Kato 1997). Last, but not least, I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Jairo Nunes, for his detailed and expert reading of this last version, and to Eduardo Raposo and the anonymous referee of Probus, for their invaluable contribution to its form and content. All the remaining mistakes and shortcomings remain my own responsibility. Probus 11 (1999), 1-37 0921^771/99/011-0001 ©Walter de Gruyter
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