PLEONASTICS AND THE INTERPRETATION OF PRONOUNS

This article presents a theory of subject-predicate relations that explains why the occurrence of pleonastics is restricted to subject position. It treats pleonastics as a default use of ''minimal'' pronouns that are interpreted as denoting a null or dummy semantic object with no properties. The fact that some positions are obligatorily filled by pleonastics is explained by the principle of Full Interpretation. The article also investigates in detail the prediction that there can be no such things as an object pleonastic and shows that this is correct. Putative counterexamples are shown to be either subjects of small clauses or theta-marked object pronouns.