Null Arguments in German Child Language

Abstract

Acquisition research has shown that, in German, the use of null subjects does not drop from about 50% to 5% in a very short space of time, but there is a drop from about 45% to between 10% and 20%. In the present article, I investigate this 10% to 20% Null Subject stage in 3-year-olds and show that this stage, though surprisingly long, is not final. Moreover, the children under investigation use structures in this phase that are found neither in the state of Early Null Subjects nor in adult German, namely postverbal referential null subjects. The latter result, the fact that this stage is not final, and differences to object-drop at the same time strongly suggest that the phenomenon cannot only be topic-drop. An analysis is proposed admitting competing strategies for a certain time, a topic-drop strategy (i.e., a strategy of identification via discourse), and a strategy of licensing and identifying null subjects through feature transfer under Government.