Null Objects and VP ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese

Null Object and VP ellipsis share the property of involving the omission of the complement selected by the verb. Their occurrence across languages does not fully overlap. In Portuguese, both constructions coexist, some sentences being ambiguous between the two constructions. In this section we will outline the scope of our study, in sections 2 and 3 we will respectively analyze the properties of Null Object and VP ellipsis in European and Brazilian Portuguese, (henceforth, EP and BP). Null Object (henceforth, Null_Obj) designates the absence of the phonological expression of the necessary nominal internal complement of a verb and corresponds to a silent DP that could be recovered from a situational or linguistic context. This construction has been the topic of various studies since the eighties, in the Principles and Parameters framework. The issue emerged in the discussion of empty categories and the Null Subject Parameter, from the observation that some languages allow the complement of transitive verbs to be phonologically null. The seminal work on Null_Obj was published by Huang (1984) and it focus on Chinese, a language that allows both subjects and objects to be null. In Chinese, null subjects can be pronominal or variables, but null objects are variables bound by a discourse topic.