Pro-drop, E-type pronouns, and agreement with reference to the null subject in Chinese and Japanese

Abstract Kuroda (1965) suggested that the empty element in Japanese is a covert pronoun. Otani and Whitman (1991) , following Huang ( 1987a / b , 1991 ), showed that the empty element may have a sloppy interpretation, which is unexpected with an ordinary referential pronoun. Oku (1998) proposes that this empty element is the result of argument ellipsis. I will return to Kuroda’s original idea and develop an analysis in which the empty elements are uniformly pronominal. Following Oikonomou (2017) , I argue that the sloppy interpretation is due to an E-type pronoun interpretation. A key comparison involves the null subject in Chinese and Japanese, which behave differently with regard to sloppy interpretation, difficult — or impossible — in Chinese, but readily possible in Japanese. This difference is due to the Chinese subject pro being the covert version of a weak pronoun, while the subject pro in Japanese, as well as those found in Romance, are the covert version of a strong pronoun.