recent research in the area of second language acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and l2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...

The present study aims to investigated Iranian L2 speaker`s knowledge of the overt pronounconstraint (OPC) in English. It also aims to examine L2 learners understanding of UniversalGrammar (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 2000, 2001) and if it is common to all languages. Specifically,this study takes a new look at the L2 acquisition of knowledge of the overt pronoun constraint(Montalbetti 1984) by Persian ...

It has been observed that overt and null subjects do not have the same distributional properties within the same pro-drop language. That is, there are certain grammatical and discourse principles that determine the occurrence of overt versus null pronominal subjects in a particular context (Enç, 1986; Erguvanlı-Taylan, 1986; Pérez-Leroux & Glass, 1997, 1999). For example, it is known that overt...

Recent research in the area of Second Language Acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and L2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. Most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...

In a language that allows null pronouns, why would a speaker bother to use an overt pronoun at all? A traditional answer is that an overt pronoun contains agreement information necessary for the identification of its antecedent. But this cannot possibly be the answer in languages like Turkish, which has subject-verb agreement, but no gender; since the verb already indicates the person and numbe...

The Basque impersonal is a detransitivized construction where the internal argument only overt and external argument, although semantically present, does not have any morphological reflex. This article argues that, despite its intransitive shape, involves particular kind of Voice projection that we term defective. For case agreement, being defective means having no uninterpretable ϕ features Ca...

I argue that Weak Crossover and Overt Pronoun Constraint effects show up systematically only with nonspecific wh-phrases. To account for this contrast, I propose an analysis based on the following condition for binding: features on bound pronouns must be licensed under c-command by features of their binders, therefore binders must be endowed (at least) with all the features of the pronouns they...

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...