On the Typology of Zero Anaphora

Abstract

Languages differ considerably in the extent to which they allow the use of zero pronouns. The occurrence of zero pronouns ranges from very limited (as in English and French), to somewhat less so (as in Italian, Spanish, etc.), to very free (as in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.). In the first kind of languages, a zero pronoun may occur only as the subject of a tenseless clause, but not as the subject of a tensed clause or as the object of any clause. This is illustrated by the English examples below, where e marks the position of a zero pronoun: