154 Małgorzata Krzek
provide support for the absence of the referential index [iR] on SIĘ. The impersonal
pro, being the complement of SIĘ in the SIĘP, cannot become co-referential with
another referential DP.
We can then hypothesize that in a language such as Polish, in which there are no
overt articles, pronouns are naturally interpreted as definite and some special means
has to be used to mark their indefiniteness. In other words, in this particular case
indefiniteness appears to be more marked than definiteness.- Agreement
Having established the feature make-up of the two impersonal pronouns in question,
the next step would be to see whether agreement between the impersonal pronoun
and the head of TP in the two constructions is established by default or whether null
pronouns are capable of triggering it.
The starting point for the discussion is the observation that, as a rule, in mor-
phologically rich languages, of which Polish is an example, inflectional markings on
the verb are exponents of the Φ-features carried by the subject. Therefore, if the sub-
ject, for example, is a 1st person singular pronoun, the verb in the present tense will
carry the 1st person inflection. This has traditionally been called Agree in Minimalist
Theory. One of the side effects of this operation is the valuation of the case feature on
a subject DP/NP by T (Chomsky 2004). This is illustrated by the sentences in (34).
(34) a. Gotuję zupę.
cook.pres 1 sg soup.acc
‘I am cooking/cook a soup.’
b. Zupa została ugotowana.
soup.nom.f become.pa s t. f cooked.F
‘A/The soup got cooked.
In (34a), the Φ-features of the null subject ja ‘I’ are reflections of the ones on the main
verb and the same is true for (34b) in which the features of the subject zupa ‘soup.FEM’
are reflected in the marking both on the auxiliary and passive participle.
In the impersonal SIĘ-construction the verb is in the 3sg form. In the past, the
verb additionally carries gender information as it is marked NEUTER, as in (35). This
appears to suggest that the pronoun that enters into an Agree relation with T has fea-
tures [+minimal] and [+neuter].^29- This is in accordance with the feature geometry given in (25), also with the assumption
that features will only appear if they have positive values.