Featureless expressions: when morphophonological expressions are absent. Linguistic Inquiry 37

Ackema and Neeleman (2003) discuss three phenomena that arise in the context of agreement and pronominals: agreement asymmetries, cliticization, and null subjects. They develop a unified analysis for these phenomena, claiming that they all involve a process of weaken-ing within prosodic domains. While we agree with their important insight that the PF interface is responsible for some of these phenom-ena, we will argue against their weakening analysis. We provide argu-ments that agreement asymmetries cannot be uniformly analyzed as involving the same processes as phonological cliticization or null sub-jects. We instead propose that the observed asymmetries arise because of the alternative forms of spelling out features at the PF interface