Preferred argument structure and subject role in American English conversational discourse

Abstract

Preferred argument structure (PAS) refers to the observed tendency for speakers to avoid expressing more than one lexical argument or more than one piece of new information in a clause, and the tendency to avoid having lexical or new referents in the transitive subject (A) position (Du Bois, 1987). Distribution of new information has been claimed by Du Bois to follow an ergative pattern, in that S, or subject of an intransitive verb, patterns with O, or object of a transitive verb even in non-ergative languages. The present study shows that PAS as formulated above can also be seen to hold for American English conversational discourse. However, the hypothesis of an ergative structuring of discourse is not borne out by my data, as S in general patterns with A rather than O, or the same constraints hold for S as for A. This is hypothesized to be due to the difference in genre, as Du Bois used the Pear Story narratives as data, but above all to the difference in language, as in English the starting-point function has been grammaticized in subjecthood and subjects mainly carry given information (Chafe, 1994). Yet there are some differences in information flow properties between A and S: S is more flexible and tends to accommodate a more varied group of referents and to respond to differences in genre and type of interaction more readily than A.