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 number of seemingly unrelated properties, such as stylistic inversion and long-range wh-extraction, to the capacity of a grammar to have non-overt subjects, i.e. finite verbs with no phonetically realized argument in the structural subject position [NP, IP]. In this framework, the difference illustrated in (1) between languages like English and Standard French, with obligatory subjects, and those like Spanish and Standard Italian, where a verb can stand alone without an overt subject, represents an important bifurcation in the class of natural languages: