61 (4)(a) I can’t find my pen (b) I think I left it at home (c) Why do I always lose things? the two italicised occurrences of the subject pronoun I can be given a null spellout because in each case I is the first word in the sentence, but not other occurrences of I – as we see from (5) below: (5)(a) Can’t find my pen (c) *Why do always lose things? (b) Think I left it at home/*Think left it at home However, not all sentence-initial subjects can be truncated (. we can’t truncate He in a sentence like He.
