Radical pro drop and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English Yosuke Sato * , Chonghyuck Kim 1 Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Blk AS 5, 7 Arts Link, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore Received 23 November 2010; received in revised form 17 February 2012; accepted 20 February 2012 Available online 1 May 2012 Abstract This article presents a re-working of Huang's (1984) parametric theory of null arguments through an in-depth examination of the so- called radical pro drop phenomenon and the role of syntactic agreement in Colloquial Singapore English/CSE, an English-lexified contact variety spoken in Singapore. We present a hitherto unnoticed observation that the otherwise liberal omission of the subject in CSE is blocked by the subject agreement –s appropriated from its English lexifier. Our central idea here is that meager agreement in CSE must be licensed/valuated by an overt NP through the specifier-head relation (Speas, 1994, 2006). This idea, coupled with Huang's theory of null arguments, captures the radical pro drop phenomenon in CSE. Our proposed analysis not only correctly predicts subject–object asymmetries with respect to reference and crossover effects in CSE but also derives the new observation that poor agreement in CSE blocks the generation of the empty category in subject position, but not in object position. We further compare our analysis with two recent alternative theories of the radical pro drop phenomenon presented by Neeleman and Szendröi (2007) and Saito (2007). We show that our analysis successfully circumvents the empirical problems CSE raises for these theories. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Radical pro drop; Pro; Variable; Crossover; Island; Colloquial Singapore English 1. Introduction This article discusses the so-called radical pro drop and the relevance of syntactic agreement to this phenomenon in Colloquial Singapore English (henceforth, CSE), an English-lexified variety spoken in Singapore that has emerged and developed out of intense language contact among the vernacular varieties of Chinese, Malay and English. 2 Developing Huang's (1984) parametric theory of null arguments with special focus on the role of syntactic agreement, we propose that the null argument option (either a silent pronoun or a variable bound by a zero topic) is blocked by the meager syntactic agreement under T. Our proposed analysis provides a straightforward account for the new observation that the otherwise liberal omission of the subject, but not that of the object, is blocked in the presence of meager subject agreement. We further compare our analysis with two recent alternative approaches to radical pro drop presented by Neeleman and Szendröi (2007) and Saito (2007). We show that there are a number of empirical problems with these approaches, which can be successfully resolved in our theory. www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Lingua 122 (2012) 858–873 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +65 6516 4088. E-mail addresses: ellys@nus.edu.sg (Y. Sato), ellkc@nus.edu.sg (C. Kim). 1 Tel.: +65 6516 6036. 2 The following abbreviations are used in this paper: A, anaphoric; ACC, accusative; ASP, aspect; COMP, completive; DAT, dative; K, kase; M, masculine; MOD, modification; NEG, negation; NOM, nominative; P, pronominal; PL, plural; POSS, possessive; Q, question marker; SG, singular; 1/2/3, first/second/third person. 0024-3841/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.02.006