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1. Introduction
Since the null topic was identified along with pro drop in the early 1980s as a significant point of parametric variation among languages as in (1) (Huang 1984, inter alia), much work has investigated the construction in Chinese-type and German-type languages.
(1)
| [pro drop] | and | [null topic] | parameters: four language types | |
| a. | [+pro drop, | −null topic] | = Italian, Spanish, etc. | |
| b. | [+pro drop, | +null topic] | = Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, etc. | |
| c. | [-pro drop, | −null topic] | = English, French, etc. | |
| d. | [-pro drop, | +null topic] | = German, etc. |
One major difference between them is that whereas the Chinese-type allows extensive types of argument drop (pro drop, argument ellipsis, “true empty category” (Li 2007, et seq.), etc.), which has led some to the undifferentiating term “radical pro drop”, the German-type is quite limited beyond the existence of a null topic. Consider German in (2). It has been pointed out that in spoken German a subject or an object pronoun can be dropped only when it is in the sentence-initial position (Ross 1982).
(2) German
ich I
habe have
ihn him
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
ihn him
habe have
ich I
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
gestern yesterday
habe have
ich I
ihn him
schon already
gesehen seen
___
habe have
ihn him
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
___
habe have
ich I
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
* ich I
habe have
___
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
* ihn him
habe have
___
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
* gestern yesterday
habe have
___
ihn him
schon already
gesehen seen
* gestern yesterday
habe have
ich I
___
schon already
gesehen seen
*___
habe have
___
gestern yesterday
schon already
gesehen seen
* gestern yesterday
habe have
___
___
schon already
gesehen seen
In each of the (a–c) sentences, the sentence-initial position, i.e., the topic position, is occupied by a subject or an object pronoun or a temporal phrase. In (d–e) the subject/object pronoun is deleted. Nonetheless, the deletion is restricted to the sentence-initial position as exhibited in the contrast between (d–e) and (f–i), an important observation made by Ross as a process of “Pronoun Zap”. In (j–k) the subject pronoun...