ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the performance approach to the null subject phenomenon is empirically inadequate and theoretically unmotivated. Performance accounts of the null subject phenomenon in child language make two important assumptions. The first is that null subjects are not a grammatical option for young English-speaking children and hence do not appear in the grammatical representation of the sentence. A second crucial assumption of this approach, made explicit by P. Bloom, is that lexical subjects such as John Whitman impose a greater. The processing production model does not account for the major statistical properties observed during the null subject stage, whereas the grammatical model makes the right predictions with respect to these same properties. The English-speaking child will never hear null subject sentences, but he or she could not exclude the null subject option on this basis unless we allow for direct or indirect negative evidence.
