Null Subjects

This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.

In this chapter, I will offer an overview of null subjects (NSs) with individual reference interpretation in the history of Russian. 1 Specifically, I will relate the current use of NSs in root contexts and NSs in syntactically embedded / subordinate clauses in Russian to their diachronic development. The diachronic approach of this chapter will take as a starting point the synchronic description of the two relevant linguistic systems representing the initial and final stages of the change, i.e. referential NSs in Old Russian and Modern Russian. Fortunately, detailed synchronic accounts of these elements have been previously put forward, especially for Modern Russian. The main contribution of this chapter will be, then, to relate two NS systems which are, in principle, very different, and explain the reasons for a natural transition from one grammar to the next. To be more precise, I will take every silent subject to be a minimal φP, in the sense of Holmberg (2005), endowed with unvalued φ-features that, in addition, needs to copy the referential index of some D-valued antecedent, in order to be interpreted as referential (otherwise, it would be interpreted as generic or arbitrary). On the one hand, I will argue that Old Russian was a "well-behaved" consistent NS language or pro-drop language (

El presente trabajo se ha desarrollado gracias a una beca de Formación de Personal Investigador otorgada por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación en el marco del proyecto «Corpus de Rección y complementación verbal del griego y el latín: verbos de dominio, transferencia y actividad mental II» (FFI2009-13402-C04-01). Agradezco a los participantes en el coloquio que siguió a la presentación oral en el congreso las observaciones y sugerencias realizadas. Asimismo, agradezco a Julián Méndez Dosuna sus valiosas críticas y recomendaciones a versiones previas de este artículo. Obviamente, cualquier error u omisión son atribuibles únicamente al autor. Símbolos y abreviaturas: Ø = sujeto nulo; M = elemento móvil; p = prepositiva; q = pospositiva. ¿ Ἐγω Y σύ NO ENFÁTICOS? EL PROBLEMA DEL SUJETO NULO EN GRIEGO ANTIGUO * ALBERTO PARDAL PADÍN Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Please cite this article as Posio, Pekka. 2011. Spanish subject pronoun usage and verb semantics revisite: First and second person singular subject pronouns and focusing of attention in spoken Peninsular Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3): 777-798.

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, firstgeneration immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers, were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011; 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were found to be mostly felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.

The paper discusses syntactic constructions with a zero subject, with focus on data from 3 languages – Russian, Ukrainian and Modern Icelandic. Zero subjects are defined in the paper according to the Meaning-Text-Theory (MTT) tradition as symbolic objects with an empty signifier and non-empty signified. Zero subject lexemes have role-and-reference semantics of their own and their meaning is not equivalent to the meaning of any non-zero signs in the same language. Zero subjects share some syntactic properties with overt sentence elements taking the subject position in the same language, notably they act as agreement controllers on the verb and can be case-marked in languages where overt grammatical subjects are case-marked and control verbal agreement. The working hypothesis raised in the present paper is that zero subjects in Russian, Ukrainian and Icelandic are always specified as non-referential Agents {+ Agent,-referential} while the specification of zero subjects as '+Human' or '-Human' as well as their agreement morphology (singular, plural form) can vary across languages. Transitive impersonals in Russian, Ukrainian and Icelandic can be accounted for in terms of Mel'čuk's zero lexemes. An alternative analysis resorting to Burzio's Generalization fails to make correct predictions. The distribution of impersonals in Russian and Ukrainian has nothing to do with the intransitive split into unaccusatives vs unergatives. Most Russian verbs labeled 'psych' in the previous research are semantic causatives or agentive verbs with an external argument and valency grid <Agent, Patient>.

It is generally assumed that languages with rich agreement allow null subjects, while languages with poor agreement do not. However, the concept of agreement richness has been remarkably difficult to define. This study, based on a sample of 403 languages, measures agreement richness by counting the number of person, number, and gender combinations encoded by subject agreement on the verb. It is shown that, among languages with subject agreement on the verb, null subject languages (NSLs) with seven or more such distinctions are the most widespread geographically and genealogically. On the other hand, NSLs without subject agreement on the verb are more widespread than NSLs with seven or more combinations only in Eurasia. Possible explanations for these tendencies are suggested.

Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP) are null subject languages where subject person is expressed by verbal affixes and the use of subject pronouns is considered to be reserved e.g. for such purposes as the expression of contrast or emphasis. However, the use of pronominal subjects differs strikingly between the two languages. The present study examines the use of first person plural subject pronouns (PS nosotros and EP nós) in corpora of spoken language and connects it with the different referential properties of first person plural. It is shown that in PS the expression of the subject pronoun nosotros is rare -it occurs only in 4.5% of all clauses with first person plural subjects -and the reference of the pronoun is always hearer-exclusive in the data under survey. In EP, the expression of the first person plural subject pronoun nós is more frequent, occurring in 32.2% of the clauses with first person plural subjects. In EP, the use of the pronoun is not restricted to the hearer-exclusive reading but is also found in contexts where the reference is construed as hearer-inclusive or impersonal. A further difference between PS and EP is that the latter has developed, in addition to first person plural proper, another construction with first person plural reference consisting of the expression a gente (literally 'the people') and a verb in third person singular. In the data examined, the construction with a gente is favoured with certain non-agentive verb lexemes: this tendency is argued to be connected with the origin of a gente as an impersonalizing strategy. Using evidence from contrastive analysis of two closely related languages, the paper argues that null subject languages and grammatical persons are highly divergent with regard to the frequency of subject pronoun expression and the factors affecting it.

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first- generation immigrants, heritage speakers, and L2 speakers, were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011; 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were fou...

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the ``richness'' of verbal subject agreement from the point of view of grammar change in Medieval French based on corpus data. We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretisation of verbal subject agreement spanning the whole Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby syncretic endings create a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven non-trivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way which would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

Pronominal systems are among those with the highest degree of variability in varieties of English. This may in part be due to the fact that many standard English varieties display some irregularity which is often 'remedied' in speech and/or informal written registers of both native (L1) and non-native (L2) varieties.

The Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC) subject domain has clitic and tonic pronouns that often amalgamate in double subject pronoun constructions; the possibility of a zero-subject and the formal category underlying subject clitics are disputed (Baptista 1995, 2002; Pratas 2004). This article discusses five variable constraints that condition subject expression across three descriptive and inferential analyses of a corpus of speech collected from 33 speakers from Santiago and Maio. Double subject pronoun constructions and zero-subjects were promoted by a persistence effect, though for the former this applied across nonadjacent clauses since double subject pronoun constructions are switch reference and contrastive devices resembling the doubling of agreement suffixes by independent pronouns in languages traditionally classified as pro-drop. Zero-subjects were favored in third-person contexts as previously observed by Baptista and Bayer (2013), and when a semantically referentially deficient (Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) DP antecedent was in an Intonational Unit that was prosodically and syntactically linked to the Intonational Unit containing the target anaphor (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). Results support reclassification of CVC subject clitics as ambiguous person agreement markers (Siewierska 2004) and suggest that CVC is developing a split-paradigm for person marking and subject expression (Wratil 2009; Baptista & Bayer 2013).

I revisit some "old" issues in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) that were formulated based on the Principles & Parameters model in the 1980s (Chomsky 1981) to accommodate them in a more current parametric approach, namely the Parameter Hierarchy (Roberts 2019). I also make two general predictions covering Brazilian Portuguese-Spanish linguistic pairs. Finally, I present the current state of my work.

I revisit some "old" issues in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) that were formulated based on the Principles & Parameters model in the 1980s (Chomsky 1981) to accommodate them in a more current parametric approach, namely the Parameter Hierarchy (Roberts 2019). I also make two general predictions covering Brazilian Portuguese-Spanish linguistic pairs. Finally, I present the current state of my work.

This presentation summarises the results of my recent study into the licensing of wide-focus subject- verb inversion in Ibero-Romance (namely, Asturian, European and Brazilian Portuguese, and Peninsular, Mexican and Rioplatense Spanish), a property which has been linked to the null subject parameter (Chomsky 1981, Rizzi 1982). The empirical data surveyed paints a more complex picture of such constructions at the microparametric level than previous accounts assume, displaying fine- grained and systematic variation according to variety and according to verb class. Further, it offers strong evidence that the neutral word order of these varieties is SVO, rather than VSO as has often been claimed in the literature. As such, an approach to null subjects of the Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (1998) and Barbosa (1995) type, involving a parameterized EPP, appears to make the wrong predictions for Ibero-Romance, whereas the data supports the approach to null subjects pursued in Holmberg (2005), Sheehan (2006) and Roberts (2010). Following Benincà (1998), Pinto (1997), Tortora (2001), Sheehan (2006, 2010), I assume that one major wide-focus inversion construction is a type of locative inversion. However, I depart from previous ‘locative’ accounts by postulating a more fine-grained analysis of the relevant locative element in such inversion constructions. This locative element is available unequally across Ibero-Romance and can surface in different positions in the higher portion of the sentential architecture, leading to the microparametric variation encountered. The data suggests that the licensing of ‘locative’ subject- verb inversion is dependent neither on the null subject parameter, since this type of inversion also occurs in non- and partial null subject varieties, nor on the unaccusative/unergative division, though there is in both cases a degree of correspondence. Instead, I argue the construction is a consequence of grammatically-encoded deictic features which correlate with the semantic properties of the verbs involved in such cases of inversion.

The goal of this chapter is to unveil the main properties of syntactic subjects in Chilean Spanish by addressing the following research questions: (i) To what degree is Chilean Spanish similar/dissimilar to Caribbean Spanish?, (ii) Is Chilean Spanish a partial pro-drop variety? According to the Null Subject Parameter (NSP, Rizzi 1982), null subject languages have the following properties: (a) rich verbal morphology, (b) null subjects in finite clauses, (c) postverbal subjects (VS order), (c) loose locality effects (absence of that-trace effects). Caribbean dialects have received particular attention as they show both pro-drop and non-pro-drop properties. However, it remains an open question to what extend those properties are found in non-Caribbean Spanish and, most importantly, in other linguistic varieties within the so-called Bajeño dialectal area. Data from corpora as well as from acceptability judgments indicate that Chilean Spanish displays some non-trivial overlapping with Caribbean Spanish with respect to pro-drop properties, and that it does not fit the partial pro-drop pattern consistently. This conclusion provides support for recent proposals according to which partiality in pro-drop properties is a matter of degree.

Abstract: This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of this distinction. We propose a novel typology of the ways in which T’s featural requirements can be satisfied, and, focusing on tense requirements, show how the typology enables us to understand the verb-movement behaviour of the Romance languages vis-à-vis their Germanic counterparts. We also show how the proposed analysis facilitates a new understanding of relevant aspects of the modern English verbal system and its diachrony.

This paper takes a closer look at the attraction properties of T. It highlights an empirically attested distinction between rich agreement inflection, exhibited by null-subject languages, and rich tense inflection, found in Romance, but not Germanic, and argues for the syntactic relevance of ...

This chapter analyzes the expression of subjects with identifiable referents in Brazilian Portuguese, using the multi-level architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008) and the notions of transparency and opacity as conceived of by this theory. The aim of the chapter is to show that in regard to subject expression, Brazilian Portuguese grammar may be developing into a more transparent system in comparison to its earlier stages and other Romance languages. It is shown that in many cases there is no verbal morphology to cross-reference the argument on the predicate with subjects being expressed by means of a single morphosyntactic unit; since this morphological unit corresponds to single units at higher levels of representation, subject expression involves a one-to-one relation between levels, resulting in a transparent system.

In this paper a novel view of the distribution of null subjects in Spanish is explored in which the discourse category of the antecedent of pro is crucially paid attention to. Implementing Frascarelli's (2007) work, I propose that the relevant interpretative condition to meet is for the null subject to be coreferential with an Aboutness-Shift Topic, which must be either an explicit one or a null (i.e. silent) double in the local domain where pro occurs. When silent, this antecedent can refer back to any type of discourse category in a previous clause. This implies an update of the information provided in the sentence containing pro. The analysis is supported by an experiment run among native speakers of Spanish. RESUMEN. En este artículo se explora un novedoso modo de ver la distribución de sujetos nulos en español, basado en la categoría discursiva que tiene el antecedente de pro. Implementando el trabajo de Frascarelli (2007), propongo que la condición interpretativa que indispensablemente debe cumplir un sujeto nulo es el que sea correferente con un Tópico Oracional, el cual debe aparecer explícitamente o tener un doble nulo (o mudo) en el dominio local donde se encuentra pro. Cuando este antecedente es mudo, puede éste referirse cualquier tipo de categoría discursiva en la ración precedente. Esto implica una actualización de la información que se da en la oración donde aparece pro. El análisis presentado se apoya en un experimento llevado a cabo entre hablantes nativos de español. Palabras clave. Sujeto nulo, tipos de tópicos, tipos de focos, doble mudo.