Null pronouns in selected subordinate clauses in Old Japanese

Abstract

Using data from the Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese, we examine null pronouns in Old Japanese, focusing on their distribution in Provisional, Conditional, and Concessive clauses. We demonstrate that the three clause types are subordinated within their larger syntactic context. Next, we investigate the ratios of occurrence of null pronouns in these clauses. We show that Provisional clauses are less likely to contain null pronouns than Conditional and Concessive clauses, and note other differences between the three clause types. We consider which aspects of clause-internal and -external properties might be responsible for these differences and reject the notion that Old Japanese has a grammaticized switch-reference system involving these inflections.