Clausal types and syntactic subjects

Abstract

In previous work (Di Domenico, 2020), I have analyzed the narrative productions of a group of Italian native speakers, in order to investigate whether the core assumption of the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis, proposed by Carminati (2002) for the resolution of intra-sententialproin Italian, could be extended to the discourse level despite Carminati’s (2002, p. 306) claim to the contrary. The data suggested that, whileprowas overwhelmingly the most attested anaphoric device, Discourse Referents were never introduced pre-verbally; the data, however, also revealed that Discourse Referents introduced as non-subject constituents were restated in subject position for subsequent resumption (through a pseudo-relative, a subject relative or an Accusative + Infinitive clause). This led to the conclusion that the core assumption of the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis could be maintained at the discourse level as well: in Italianprolooks for an antecedent in Spec, IP also inter – sententially. The present work addresses the same question in Greek, which is, as Italian, a null-subject language, and compares the Greek results to the Italian ones of the previous work. The analysis reveals that things work in part differently in the two languages, given that the pre-verbal subject position is frequently employed for the introduction of brand new Discourse Referents in Greek, contrary to Italian. Restatement in subject position, however, modulo some differences concerning the clausal types attested in the two languages, still holds whenever Discourse Referents are introduced as non-subject constituents, suggesting thatprolooks for an antecedent in Spec, IP in Greek as well as in Italian.