Null arguments in early Germanic

Abstract This chapter discusses the occurrence of null arguments in early Germanic. In 5.2 it presents data on the occurrence of null arguments from five key early Germanic languages, including new quantitative studies of Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, and Old Saxon. Section 5.3 analyses these data within a generative framework, assessing the applicability of different theories. It argues that the theory of identification of null subjects by rich verbal agreement is not sufficient to explain the range of null arguments attested in early Germanic; a topic-drop analysis is also ruled out. It is argued the early Northwest Germanic languages were ‘partial’ null argument languages. In 5.4 these languages are looked at from a diachronic perspective, and it is argued that the restriction to main clauses found in Northwest Germanic is an innovation, and that we can tentatively reconstruct Proto-Germanic (like Gothic) as a canonical null subject language.