English Subjectless Tagged Sentences
Paul Kay

A colloquial English sentence like "Fooled us, didn't they?" contains a
finite verb but no expressed subject.  The reference of the missing
subject of "fooled" is identified via the reference of the tag subject
"they." Compare: "Fooled us, didn't she?", "Fooled us, didn't you?" This
paper argues (1) that such subjectless tagged sentences (STSs) pose a
problem for grammatical approaches based on movement and empty categories
and (2) that STSs receive a revealing analysis as part of a finely
articulated family of tagged sentence constructions when viewed within a
non-derivational, constructional, multiple-inheritance-based approach.