Putative Null Pronominals In English: Causes and Consequences

A null pronominal has sometimes been posited in an extraction site of raising to subject that creates a remnant constituent in the literature. I argue that what has been recognized as a null pronominal should be viewed as a covert definite determiner. Counter‐cyclic merger of a restrictor NP with a determiner and a procedure for interpreting movement dependencies conspire to produce this syntactic object. Considering also extraction from a certain kind of island, which shows the same traits as raising to subject mentioned above, I will characterize under what circumstances we perceive an effect of a putative null pronominal and why we do so under those circumstances. I conclude that the role of Case is particularly important in our understanding of this effect.