Strong and weak pronouns in the covert system of pronouns

Abstract

Abstract In this article, which is taken almost verbatim from parts of Agreement Beyond Phi (Miyagawa, Shigeru. 2017. Agreement beyond phi. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.), I focus on a puzzling observation about subject pro across languages: in languages such as Japanese and those of Romance, the subject pro behaves exactly like a pronoun in being able to freely refer to entities in the discourse with reasonable context, and also to refer sentence internally to a subject, an object, or other phrases. However, in Chinese, the subject pro is extremely limited in its reference potential: it is able to refer to a discourse entity in very narrow contexts, and sentence internally, its antecedent is limited to the subject. I show that the Chinese subject pro demonstrates the principles of Strong Uniformity, by depending on ϕ-feature agreement for sentence-internal reference, and when that option isn’t taken, switches to the Topic feature to refer to a discourse entity.