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Language Economy and the Drop-Drop Theory from a Minimalist Perspective

Erika Corbara, MA (University of Potsdam, Slavic Linguistics)          

Aim of this talk is a new reconsideration of the pro-drop theory: the so called pro-drop languages and their syntactic and semantic features will be indagated from a strongly minimalist point of view in order to determine which are the very responsible mechanisms to allow a language to drop its subject pronouns.Starting and fundamental point of this study is the consideration of the language faculty as biological system of the human being: as biological i.e. physical system it regulates then its mechanisms with the same principles which occur in the nature - economy and optimality.This provides to a more simplicistic explanation of the pro-drop phenomenon, which leads to a shift of the research field from syntactic features to semantic ones.