An unexpected gap with unexpected restrictions : subject deletion in a South West Swedish dialect

The aim of this article is to propose a syntactic analysis of a dialectal con- struction systematically displaying deletion of the subject, found in spoken south-west Swedish. The deletion appears in certain interrogative subordi- nated clauses and relative clauses, where standard Swedish requires a re- sumptive pronoun, which hence can be left out in the dialectal clause con- struction. The proposed analysis takes as its point of departure the assump- tion that the construction exemplifies a special kind of Topic drop. As a consequence, the syntactic analysis requires an elaborated C-domain, and a Split CP analysis is proposed. It is claimed that Spec,TP must be phoneti- cally realized in standard Swedish but not in the dialect counterpart.