Empty subjects in Finnish and Hebrew

Finnish and Hebrew (in most tenses) share an unusual mixed subject omission pattern: the subject NP is optional in the first and second person but is generally required in the third person. A unified analysis of the two langu ages is developed in this paper, using certain proposals of Minimalism and a licensing principle which requires that both the specifier and the head p osition of a projection must be filled. In addition to the null subject pat tern, Finnish and Hebrew differ both from traditional pro-drop and from non - pro-drop languages in the patterning of the agreement paradigm; the analy sis developed here provides a connection between the mixed null subject pat tern and the special agreement paradigm.