Sentence-level pronominal subjects in Romanian
Sentence-level pronominal subjects in Romanian

Summary/Abstract: The current paper aims at investigating the interpretive differences between null and overt pronominal subjects in Romanian in intra-sentential environments. In order to do this, we make use of Reinhart’s (1983, 1997, 1999, 2000) pronoun resolution strategies, namely semantic variable binding and pragmatic covaluation. More specifically, we hypothesize that null pronominal subjects are interpreted via binding, whereas overt forms get the covaluation interpretation. We argue that the availability of a bound variable reading for null pronouns and that of a covaluation interpretation for overt elements also follows from accessibility theory proposed in Ariel (1990, 1991, 1994). The conclusion shows that the overt pronoun can also act as a variable bound by an operator, but this possibility is blocked by accessibility predictions. Our analysis is supported by a corpus of Romanian examples that take into account different types of antecedents.

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