ABSTRACT
The chapter collected here represent some of the work carried out in the period 2002-2007 by the group working on the project “Null Subjects and the Structure of Parametric Theory”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Great Britain. The central goal of that project was to investigate and, if possible, refine the notion of parameter of Universal Grammar, as it has been understood in generative theory since roughly 1980, by looking carefully at the phenomena associated with one of the best-known and most widely discussed examples of a parameter: the null-subject parameter (NSP). The authors discuss the phenomena from English and various Romance languages which originally motivated the postulation of the NSP. Next, the authors summarise the main kinds of null-subject system that have been identified in the comparative-syntax literature. This leads us to briefly propose a hierarchical model of parameter schemata which combines the notion of micro-and macroparameters.
