ON NULL SUBJECTS AND NULL OBJECTS IN GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

The aim of this article is to provide a critical review of both the ph enomenology and the many and diverse generative (up to and including m inimalist) analyses of null subjects and null objects. Data drawn from a wide range of genetically unrelated and structurally diverse langua ges indicate that the conditions that license and identify null subjec ts and null objects remain to be fully, isolated, and that a single or a few syntactic parameters may never be adequate in accounting for th em. The reason is that different (groups of) languages may require dif ferent licensing and identification strategies, some of which are clea rly pragmatic/discourse in nature, as in the case of Chinese, Imbabura Quechua, and Old Icelandic. As a step toward accounting for null subj ects and null objects in these languages, the last section outlines a novel approach to the identification of them, one couched in the neo-G ricean pragmatic theory of anaphora IT have developed in Y. Huang (198 7, 1989, 1991a, 1991b, 1994, i.p.).