Abstract

Montalbetti (1984) points out certain semantic differences between phonetically full and phonetically empty pronouns (henceforth full and n u l l pronouns) that challenge the traditional interpretive parallelism between empty and full categories (see Chomsky 1981, 1982). He shows that both in subject (1) and object position (2), while null pronouns can be interpreted as bound variables (as in (1a) and (2a) ), full pronouns cannot (as in (1c) and (2c)).