The Development of a Mixed Null Subject System: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective With Data on the Acquisition of Hebrew

Abstract

Hebrew has a mixed pattern of subject omission: Although subject pronouns may be freely omitted in first- and second-persons past and future tense, they are obligatory in the third-person past and future as well as in the present tense, in which person is not marked at all. In this article, we present longitudinal data from 3 children, ages 1;9 to 2;3, mean length of utterance (MLU) 1.5 to 3.2, whose first and only language is Hebrew. Findings show very early acquisition of the null subject system. Omission patterns approximate the adult even before age 2, with MLU around 2.5. We propose that the observed acquisitional pattern can best be accounted for by Vainikka and Levy's (1995; 1999) recently proposed syntactic model of null subject patterns that accounts for uniform as well as for mixed systems of subject omission.