RT Journal Article
SR Electronic(1)
A1 Haegeman, Liliane
YR 2017
T1 Unspeakable sentences: Subject omission in written registers: a cartographic analysis
JF Linguistic Variation
VO 17
IS 2
SP 229
OP 250
DO https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14019.hae
PB John Benjamins
SN 2211-6834,
AB The empirical focus of this paper is register based subject omission in English. On the basis of a range of empirical data (including naturally occurring examples) the paper first dispels a number of common misconceptions about the phenomenon such as the idea that (i) this phenomenon is only restricted to diary style, (ii) only first person subjects can be omitted, (iii) the null subject is an instantiation of pro, (iv) the null subject is always uniquely identified in the context. The paper develops the cartographic analysis of register based subject omission proposed in
Haegeman (2013)
and based on
Rizzi’s (2006b)
‘Privilege of the Root’ approach. A key ingredient of the analysis is the hypothesis that there is a specialized projection for the encoding of subjecthood (SubjP).,
UL https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lv.14019.hae