Age of Onset and Dominance in the Choice of Subject Anaphoric Devices: Comparing Natives and Near-Natives of Two Null-Subject Languages (original) (raw)

2019, Frontiers in Psychology

Greek third person personal pronouns disappeared around the 5th-6th century B.C. (Panagiotidis, 2000) and were substituted by demonstratives, as aftos in (3.c; this one) or ekinos (that one), with an anaphoric function. These demonstrative pronouns can also have an inanimate antecedent, contrary to Italian overt pronouns. In Italian, demonstrative pronouns can also be used with anaphoric function, with inanimate referents only or, with a pejorative flavor, in substandard varieties with animate/human referents. (3.a) shows another difference between Greek and Italian, in that Greek freely allows post-verbal subjects (Roussou and Tsimpli, 2006), and VSO, while in Italian the post-verbal position of subjects is restricted to new-information focus subjects and VSO is impossible (Belletti, 2001, 2004). Post-verbal subjects and VSO are also possible in Spanish, although Greek and Spanish partly differ, word order being more flexible in Greek than in Spanish, since VSO is allowed by different mechanisms in the two languages (Roussou and Tsimpli, 2006). 2 The null pronoun, for instance, binds the anaphor se stesso in (i.c) as the lexical DP Gianni does in (i.a). Contrary to pronouns (lo in i.b), anaphors must be bound within the clause containing them: (i) a. Paolo i ha detto [che [Gianni j proteggerà se stesso j ]] P. said that G. will protect himself b. Paolo i ha detto [che [Gianni j lo * J proteggerà]] P. said that G. him will protect c. Paolo i ha detto [che [pro i proteggerà se stesso i] ] P. said that he will protect himself