Seid Tvica (Göttingen)
On pro-drop
In this talk I will contend that, despite the standard observation that pro drop languages fall into categories of those with rich agreement on the one hand and radical pro-drop languages on the other(cf. Koeneman and Zeijlstra (2019) and many references therein), there are pro-drop languages that exhibit properties of both. To capture all three types of languages, I propose an analysis in which pro-drop depends on (i) whether or not there is a requirement that the case features of T are realized, and (ii) whether or not agreement affixes (can) absorb the case requirement of T. Crucially, this hinges on the assumption that T varies cross-linguistically in that in some languages T must overtly realize case (achieving a result comparable to that of the EPP feature), whereas in other languages, such requirements are absent.