Radical pro drop and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English

This article presents a re-working of Huangʹs (1984) parametric theory of null arguments through an in-depth examination of the so-called radical pro drop phenomenon and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English/CSE, an English-lexified contact variety spoken in Singapore. We present a hitherto unnoticed observation that the otherwise liberal omission of the subject in CSE is blocked by the subject agreement –s appropriated from its English lexifier. Our central idea here is that meager agreement in CSE must be licensed/valuated by an overt NP through the specifier-head relation (Speas, 1994, 2006). This idea, coupled with Huangʹs theory of null arguments, captures the radical pro drop phenomenon in CSE. Our proposed analysis not only correctly predicts subject–object asymmetries with respect to reference and crossover effects in CSE but also derives the new observation that poor agreement in CSE blocks the generation of the empty category in subject position, but not in object position. We further compare our analysis with two recent alternative theories of the radical pro drop phenomenon presented by Neeleman and Szendröi (2007) and Saito (2007). We show that our analysis successfully circumvents the empirical problems CSE raises for these theories.