Taking a micro-comparative approach within Romance null subject languages, I argue that cross-linguistic variation in the distributions of null subjects can be attributed to differences in the featural composition of overt subject pronouns. I use data from Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish to show that more semantically and syntactically complex overt pronouns are restricted in their distributions when compared to less complex overt pronouns; as a result, pro-drop languages with highly restricted overt subject pronouns will omit these forms in favor of the null form more often. I will explain a number of interpretative and frequency-based contrasts associated with pronouns in both languages in terms of Schlenker (2005)'s pragmatic principle Minimize Restrictors!. I will show that this approach has an empirical advantage over the standard analyses of variation between null subject languages, which posit parameters in the inflectional domain that over-predict categorical syntactic differences in the availability of pro in different languages.
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