Unspeakable sentences

The empirical focus of this paper is register based subject omission in English. On the basis of a range of empirical data (including naturally occurring examples) the paper first dispels a number of common misconceptions about the phenomenon such as the idea that (i) this phenomenon is only restricted to diary style, (ii) only first person subjects can be omitted, (iii) the null subject is an instantiation of pro, (iv) the null subject is always uniquely identified in the context. The paper develops the cartographic analysis of register based subject omission proposed in Haegeman (2013) and based on Rizzi’s (2006b) ‘Privilege of the Root’ approach. A key ingredient of the analysis is the hypothesis that there is a specialized projection for the encoding of subjecthood (SubjP).