Recent work in the generative framework of grammar has avoided explicit language-particular syntactic rules. This has had definite consequences for some theories of recoverability. In his solidly argued work, Yves Roberge considers the possibility that empty syntactic argument positions, where their content is recoverable in a very local sense, are a property of some natural languages: the null argument property.

In The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments Roberge studies the syntactic properties of subject and object clitic pronouns in several Romance languages and dialects from the perspective of the Principles-and-Parameters framework in generative grammar. He is able to make important claims through a comparative study of various rarely discussed French dialects, Spanish dialects, and Italian, and concludes that French should be analysed as a null subject language like many others in the Romance family.

Roberge's parameters are so carefully detailed as to allow tests to be drawn up for both first and second language learners. As such, The Syntactic Recoverability of Null Arguments will be of interest not only to syntacticians and dialectologists but also to researchers in the field of language acquisition.