Gréte Dalm1; 1 Finno-Ugric and Uralic Studies Hamburg University, Hungary
Discussion
While it is sufficient for lexical pronominal arguments with the individual reference XE "individual reference" interpretation in dependent clauses to be syntactically licensed, their null counterparts must also be semantically licensed by a discourse-related operator in the C-domain periphery (Rizzi 1997), in the sense of Sigurðsson (2004) and Bianchi (2006).The proposed licensing XE "licensing" mechanism differs from Frascarelli’s (2007, 2018) Topic Criterion, according to which null pronominals must be licensed by the Aboutness-Shift Topic. Hungarian sentences have a rich left periphery with an Operator Field in it (see Bródy 1995), which serves as the locus of semantic licensing. Generic exclusive null pronouns are licensed by a quantifier, while generic inclusive null pronouns are licensed by the GN operator in SAPP in the left periphery of the sentence (see Bianchi 2006).
