Null Arguments in Old Norwegian: Interaction Between Pronouns and the Functional Categories of the Clause
Null arguments in Old Norwegian: interaction between pronouns and the functional categories of the clause Abstract In this paper I propose a new analysis of null arguments in Old Norwegian. I argue that the option of null realization in Old Norwegian correlates with a distinction between fP and DP pronouns in the sense of Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002), and that this distribution can be captured by a version of pronoun deletion (Roberts 2010b). On a more general, theoretical level, I argue that both the structure of pronouns and that of the functional domains C, T and v influence the null argument properties of a language. Thus, null arguments, but also blocking of null arguments in non-null-argument languages like Modern Norwegian and English, may be derived in different ways.0 Key words: syntax, null arguments, syntactic variation, historical linguistics, Norwegian 1 Introduction Null arguments in early Germanic have received an increased amount of attention in recent years (cf. e.g. Sigurðsson 1993 and Kinn et al. 2016 on Old Icelandic, Faarlund 2013 on Old Norse, Håkansson 2008, 2013 on Old Swedish, Heltoft 2012 on Old Danish, Axel 2007 on Old 0The preparation of this paper was partially funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant No. 269752 “Rethinking Comparative Syntax.” It is based on research conducted as a part of my PhD project (Kinn 2016). I would like to thank the editor of Linguistic Variation, three anonymous reviewers, Jan Terje Faarlund, Theresa Biberauer, Anders Holmberg, David Willis, Michelle Sheehan, Ian Roberts, Kalle Johansson, Maia Duguine, George Walkden, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Elly van Gelderen, Ulrike Demske, Sverre Stausland Johnsen, Klaus Johan Myrvoll and the audiences at Understanding pro-drop, CamCos4 and DiGS17 for valuable comments and suggestions.
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