Publisher's Synopsis
In The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments Roberge studies the syntactic properties of subject and object clitic pronouns in several Romance languages and dialects from the perspective of the Principles-and-Parameters framework in generative grammar. He is able to make important claims through a comparative study of various rarely discussed French dialects, Spanish dialects, and Italian, and concludes that French should be analysed as a null subject language like many others in the Romance family. Roberge's parameters are so carefully detailed as to allow tests to be drawn up for both first and second language learners. As such, The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments will be of interest not only to syntacticians and dialectologists but also to researchers in the field of language acquisition.
