Obligatorily Overt PRO in San Martín Peras Mixtec

Abstract

This article presents obligatory control constructions in San Martín Peras Mixtec, a language in which PRO must be exponed with an overt pronoun. I propose a morphological analysis of this phenomenon in which this language lacks a null allomorph for bound minimal pronouns (Kratzer 2009, Safir 2014, Landau 2015, 2018), posited to underlie silent PRO in other languages. This suggests that null exponence ought not be ontologically tethered to PRO’s distribution or interpretation, but can rather be reduced to the routine functions of language-specific contextual allomorphy.