Null subjects in English – economically motivated? (original) (raw)

Null subjects in spoken North-East English

This paper presents data and analysis relating to null subjects in spoken colloquial English. While English is not a „pro-drop‟ language (i.e. subjects must usually be overt), a corpus of speech collected on Tyneside and Wearside in 2007 shows that null subjects are permitted in finite clauses in certain contexts. This paper analyses these examples and follow-up questionnaires, and compares the data with the other types of null subject described in the literature (pro-drop, topic-drop, early null subjects, aphasics‟ null subjects and „diary-drop‟), ultimately concluding that the colloquial English phenomenon is most closely related to diary- drop.

Null subjects in Northeast English

Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 17: 23-45, 2011

Null Subjects in Northeast English Bailey 23 NULL SUBJECTS IN NORTHEAST ENGLISH

2011

Null Subjects in Early Child English and the Theory of Economy of Projection

1994

It is well-known that young children may omit referential subjects regardless of whether they are acquiring a pro-drop language such as Italian or a nonpro-drop language such as English. The classic proposal of according to which these early null subjects instantiate pro in both types of languages has recently come under attack from various sides. and argue that missing subjects in early child English are a non-syntactic performance phenomenon that is due to a production bottleneck which severely limits the utterance length of young children, a view which they support with an inverse correlation between subject-length (i.e. full NP, pronoun, null) and VP-length. Rizzi (1994a,b) and maintain that empty subjects in early child English are a syntactic phenomenon but relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style Topic Drop instead of Italian-style pro-drop. In particular, they argue that like adult Diary /Topic Drop and unlike adult pro-drop, these missing subjects in early child language are restricted to the first position of non-Wh root clauses.

Null vs. Overt Pronouns and the Topic-Focus Articulation in

Italian Journal of …, 2002

shows that the existence of both phonetically full and phonetically null pronouns (pro) in Italian reflects a division of labor with respect to anaphora resolution. Pro prefers to link to prominent antecedents more than its phonetically overt counterpart does (where prominence is determined by syntactic position in intrasentential anaphora cases).

Pragmatically motivated null subjects in English: A relevance theory perspective

Journal of Pragmatics, 2013

Despite English being traditionally classified as a non-null subject language, there are certain discourse contexts in which subject pronouns may be left non-overt. While previous analyses of this phenomenon have focused on syntactic explanations, each has acknowledged that pragmatics plays a vital role in understanding their production and interpretation. This paper takes up where the syntactic analyses leave off, and offers an analysis of the pragmatic motivation behind null subjects in non-null subject languages, focusing particularly on English. It is argued that, far from being exceptional, pragmatically motivated null subjects are not surprising on a relevance-theoretic approach to utterance production and interpretation (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95). Three categories of null subject are identified, each driven by the balance between hearer's effort and cognitive effects, while allowing for the speaker's abilities and preferences. It is argued that pronouns encode procedural information which guides the hearer to the intended subject referent. Furthermore, the analysis of the discourse contexts in which these subjects may be optionally omitted sheds light not only on the nature of the pronouns themselves, but on the nature of the utterance interpretation process generally, and has important implications for the study of style.

Topic-drop versus pro-drop: null subjects and pronominal subjects in the Spanish L2 of Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese speakers

Second Language Research, 1999

Recent developments within the so-called Principles and Parameters model of acquisition argue for a clear-cut separation of Universal Grammar (UG) principles from parametric options and locate all parameters within functional categories (Borer, 1984; Lebeaux, 1988; Chomsky, 1991). This has led Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) to propose that adult L2 (second language) learners have access to UG principles but do not reset the parameters of the L2, which amounts to saying that null subjects in the adult Spanish L2 may or may not have the same status as native Spanish null subjects, depending on the speakers’ L1 (first language) and the UG principles at stake. In the case of L1 acquisition, Rizzi (1994) and Hyams (1994) provide a competence account of null subjects in early child English which relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style topic-drop rather than to Spanish-style pro-drop. They specifically argue that these missing subjects are restricted to the first position of n...

An account of the variation in the rates of overt subject pronouns in Romance

Spanish in Context, 2012

This paper examines the variation between null and overt subject pronouns found in Romance null subject languages (NSL). While it is well known that several factors regulate the distribution between these two forms, it is also well known that not all null subject languages behave the same. The contexts in which null and overt subject pronouns are required or forbidden vary across dialects, as well as their rates. This paper examines such quantitative and qualitative differences and proposes two mechanisms to explain them.

Null pronouns in English: Evidence from particle verb constructions

Particle verbs are a type of complex predicates common to Germanic languages, whose syntactic characteristics in their respective languages have presented a puzzle for the generative enterprise almost since its inception (Chomsky, 1957). A class of English particle verbs (PVs) which show an argument structure alternation between ground promotion and figure retention, also shows a pragmatic asymmetry (Levin and Sells, 2007). This paper argues that this pragmatic asymmetry is the result of a null pronoun which has previously not been described. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that a previous attempt to account for ground promotion (Svenonius, 2003) predicts the presence of this null pronoun. Finally, this null pronoun, though it bears some similarity to null elements in other languages, does not fit neatly within a typology.

Want to talk about it? A Minimalist analysis of subject omission in colloquial English.

This dissertation examines the use of subject omission in colloquial English and the constraints placed upon it, with the aim of discovering whether the missing subjects seen in colloquial English are the same as the null subjects frequently used in complete and/or partial null subject languages. In contrast to the beliefs of researchers such as Crystal (2009), it shows that subject omission in colloquial English is not a random occurrence based on a conscious decision, but rather has a more complex base, shown by the constraints placed upon when we can and cannot omit a subject. It begins by discussing some of the existing theories surrounding the topics of subject omission and null subjects, both in English itself and other languages which frequently use null subjects (null subject languages, NSLs), in order to establish what is already known about this phenomenon. It thenexamines data taken from colloquial English, with the aim of discovering how the lexical content of the missing subject is recovered and the different constraints which are placed upon subject omission in colloquial English. It considers the possibility that missing subjects are derived by an omission rule applied to CP and IP, examining whether any existing theories can explain the data as satisfactorily, and discussing how it might function.

Null subjects in English – economically motivated? (original) (raw)

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