On expletive subject pronoun drop in Colloquial French

Automatic Recognition of French Expletive Pronoun Occurrences

We present a tool, called ILIMP, which takes as input a raw text in French and produces as output the same text in which every occurrence of the pronoun il is tagged either with tag [ANA] for anaphoric or [IMP] for impersonal or expletive. This tool is therefore designed to distinguish between the anaphoric occurrences of il, for which an anaphora resolution system has to look for an antecedent...

null expletive pronoun: a minimalist approach‎

traditional work on pro-drop languages identified a set of parametric values ‎associated with the availability of null subjects, including the presence of null ‎expletive subjects. in the same vein, but more within the framework of minimalist ‎program, i will discuss while referential subjects may optionally be overt or covert ‎in the persian, expletives are obligatorily null. in this regard, a...

Subject Pronoun Variation in Central Romance

A considerable amount of research in generative syntax over the last decade and a half has been based on the hypothesis that the settings of binary parameters, such as [± null subject], can exhaustively describe the full range of possible grammars of natural languages!. Indeed, the prime example used by Chomky (1981) is the so-called "null subject parameter", which was supposed to correlate a n...

3 Icelandic Expletive Constructions and the Distribution of Subject Types

Pronominal Clitics in Québec Colloquial French: A Morphological Analysis

The grammatical status of Romance pronominal clitics has long been the object of intense debate. Are they syntactically-independent arguments or are they affixal agreement markers? This dissertation addresses this question with respect to Québec Colloquial French (QCF). It treats the morphophonological and morphosyntactic dimensions as two independent dimensions, thus allowing either for affixe...