Nicolis Marco. "The Null Subject Parameter and Correlating Properties: the case of Creole Languages." The Limits of Syntactic Variation. Ed. Theresa Biberauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008.
This work is concerned with Rizzi's (1982) correlations between the positive setting of the Null Subject Parameter and other apparently unrelated grammatical properties (null expletives, Free Inversion, Insensitivity to that-t effects). I show that Rizzi's proposal that the lack of that-t trace effects relies upon the availability of Free Inversion is both empirically questionable (the 8 Creole languages analyzed are insensitive to that-t effects but they all lack Free Inversion) and theoretically unnecessary. I propose that it is the availability of null expletives that allows for the lack of that-t effects.
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