Joe:
> Also of interest is Paul Kay's paper, which will appear in
> _Language_. It concerns subjectless tagged sentences such
> as:
>
> (1) a. Scared you, didn't I?
> b. Blew it, didn't you?
>
> K shows that cataphoric pro is a huge problem for P&P.
What evidence is there that (1a-b) are subjectless?
I would analyse these as involving sentence-initial deletion:
it is debatable whether this is a construction in its own
right, or whether it can be analysed as a kind of delay
in switching the voice on, but be that as it may, these
examples can be interpreted only as though there was a
personal pronoun deleted.
> P.S. I'm currently working on a subsection in my thesis called
> "English as a Pro-Drop Language" in my thesis. So far I've been
> able to come up with a fair-sized list of subjectless English
> sentence constructions. Some are based on syntactic constructions;
> others are based on lexical constructions (e.g., "Gotcha!").
> It's all good fun!
I'd be interested to see these.
--And.
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