Null subject pronouns in Broca's speech production

Abstract

Background: Pronouns are known to be often missing from the spontaneous speech production of Broca's aphasic patients. Null subject pronouns are found in nonfinite utterances. These structures may result from the underspecification of the Tense head and the unavailability of Nominative case for a subject. It is not clear, though, whether null subject pronouns are restricted only to nonfinite structures.Aims: The paper investigates the occurrence of null subject pronouns in finite sentences of Broca's patients. A detailed study into the syntactic and distributional properties of finite null subjects will reveal their nature and origin in aphasic speech production.Methods & Procedures: The spontaneous speech of 13 Dutch patients was investigated. The following variables were included: finiteness (finite versus nonfinite utterances), sentence position (initial versus non‐initial position), and type of pronoun (personal versus demonstrative pronoun). The speech production of the patients was contrasted to normal spoken Dutch.Outcomes & Results: The results demonstrate that finite null subject pronouns in Broca's speech production can be interpreted as instances of normal omission phenomena found in Germanic languages (Topic Drop and I‐Drop).Conclusion: A unified account is proposed for nonfiniteness and finite null subjects in terms of underspecification of functional heads in the syntactic structure. Underspecification is not due to a linguistic impairment, but rather a means to reduce the processing load of the utterance. It is concluded that nonfiniteness is a core phenomenon in Broca's speech production, while finite null subjects reflect an additional omission phenomenon.