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Third person null subjects in Hebrew, Finnish and Rumanian: an accessibility-theoretic account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2004

EYNAT GUTMAN
EYNAT GUTMAN
Affiliation:
The University of Delaware
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Abstract

Hebrew (past and future tenses) and Standard Finnish exhibit limitations on third person pro-drop, although their first and second person pro-drop follows the well-known Spanish/Italian pattern. This paper aims to show that only a detailed theory of discourse anaphora, such as the one proposed by Ariel (1990, 2001), can account for the distribution of third person pro-drop in Hebrew and Finnish; accounts proposing a syntactic analysis of the phenomenon cannot explain the whole range of data. A comparison between Hebrew and Finnish reveals a difference in the distribution of third person null subjects: Finnish appears to be significantly more restrictive than Hebrew. These two languages are also compared to Rumanian, a typical pro-drop language, which shows almost free third person pro-drop across the board.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , November 2004 , pp. 463 - 490
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper is an elaborated version of Gutman (1999: chapter 3). Thanks to two anonymous JL referees for their insightful comments. I would like to thank my thesis advisor Gabriella Hermon, and my committee members Peter Cole, Colin Phillips and Robert Frank for their guidance. I have also benefited from discussions with Satoshi Tomioka, and could not have established my research on Finnish without the help of Tarja Heinonen, Lauri Carlson and Elsi Kaiser. Thanks also to Satu Manninen, Lea Laitinen and Kimmo Koskenniemi for their help with Finnish, to my family and friends for their Hebrew judgments, and thanks to my husband and his family members for providing the Rumanian data. Any errors are my own.
Abbreviations used in example glosses are: 1st – first person, 2nd – second person, 3rd – third person, acc – accusative, ade – adessive, all – allative, ela – elative, f – feminine, fut – future, gen – genitive, ill – illative, ine – inessive, inf – infinitive, m – masculine, obj – object, part – partitive, pass – passive, past – past tense, pl – plural, poss – possessive, px – possessive suffix, sg – singular