Pronouns and the edge of the clause

The ultimate aim of the following pages is to explore the hypothesis that sentences containing a pronoun be analyzed as involving a topic pronoun doubling relation in a way that closely parallels the one overtly realized in Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Hanging Topic (HT) structures in Italian/Romance. In a nutshell: when a pronoun is present in the clause, a silent doubled non-overt topic, a pronoun as well, can be assumed to be present at the edge of the clause. Hence, presence of a pronoun implies presence of a silent pronominal topic. Some principle of non-pronunceability of the edge of the clause along the lines proposed in Kayne (2006), Rizzi (2005), accounts for lack of the overt realization of the topic. In this respect, the hypothesis shares significant similarities with the analysis proposed in Rizzi (2005) for German cases of topic-drop of the kind illustrated in (1) (Ross (1982), Cardinaletti (1990)), and is very much in the spirit of Huang (1984) analysis of Chinese zero objects: