Extending partial pro-drop in Modern Hebrew: A comprehensive analysis

The phenomenon of pro-drop whereby pronominal arguments may be omitted in particular contexts is well-known and well-studied. Moreover, the notion of the Null Subject Parameter, which presumably distinguishes between those languages which allow unexpressed pronominal subjects (i.e., pro-drop languages) and those which do not, is prevalent in the transformational syntax literature. Modern Hebrew (MH) poses a challenge to this bifurcation since it exhibits what is referred to as ‘partial pro-drop’, where pro-drop is only partially licensed in the language. Traditionally, the distinction between cases where pro-drop is licensed in MH, and those in which it is prohibited, was based on the person and tense features of the verb. This generalization, however, was shown to be empirically false in several papers (Borer 1989, Ariel 1990, Vainikka & Levy 1999, and Gutman 2004), each discussing a subset of the data, from one particular aspect. In this paper I take a broader perspective by first conducting a comprehensive corpus-based survey1 of cases in which the traditional distinction fails, followed by a careful syntactic analysis of the data. This process, as I show, reveals broad generalizations which have not been made to date, as well as insights concerning the correlation between the control of unexpressed subjects of infinitival complements and the identification of dropped subjects in finite complement clauses. In addition, this research raises questions regarding the configurational structure of Modern Hebrew.