Overt Pronominal Subjects Research Articles

Embedded Polarization in the Fourth Gospel: Overt Pronominal Subjects as a Rhetorical Summons to Take Sides

Engaging with the latest in Johannine scholarship, this article zeroes in on a largely unexplored topic within Johannine language and style, namely, the very frequent and consistent use by the evangelist of overt pronominal subjects throughout his gospel. Against the background of a brief discussion of Johannine style in recent scholarship, Martin-Asensio reviews and evaluates the treatment of overt pronominal subjects in NT Greek and Modern Greek linguistics. Martin-Asensio then proposes an interpretation that, on one hand, coheres with the recent Modern Greek study by Pavlidou and, on the other, stresses the rhetorical and oral performance import of these forms in the Fourth Gospel. Overt pronominal subjects (OPS) in the Fourth Gospel are found to support the redefining of subjects by marking them as new. OPSs serve to constantly question and redefine the identity of the participants in relation to Jesus, to truth, to Moses and Abraham, to the law and the temple and to God. More than merely emphasizing one subject or another, these OPSs are encoding the interplay of identities in flux and conflict throughout the FG and call for a decision in the face of that conflict. Additionally, Martin-Asensio draws attention to the rhetorical usefulness of these OPS patterns in the context of oral performance. In Greek, as in many other languages, the marked or new element of the clause carries tonic prominence when spoken or read, that is, the marked element is prosodically prominent. Such prominence would have been exploited by oral performers and would have powerfully drawn in audiences to the Fourth Gospel’s call to take sides.

Translation Between L2 Acquisition and L1 Attrition: Anaphora Resolution in Italian by English–Italian Trainee Translators

This article reports on the findings of an empirical study that relates translation studies and research on language acquisition/attrition by looking at the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects, previously found to be problematic in both domains. The focus is on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by two groups of native speakers, English–Italian trainee translators and a control group of non-translators. The participants did a picture selection task in which they had to identify the antecedents of third person null and overt subject pronouns in ambiguous anaphoric and cataphoric conditions. Contrary to what was expected based on previous work, proposing that translators undergo a form of first language attrition due to extended exposure to a second language, trainee translators did not exhibit evidence of overt pronoun overgeneralization (i.e. second language influence). In fact, they selected pragmatically inappropriate antecedents to a lesser extent than the control group, leading to the conclusion that in language comprehension, metalinguistic awareness can override other influences affecting translators.

On the optionality in L2 pronominal production and interpretation

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion pertaining to the source of optionality in second language (L2) pronominal interpretation. We examined pronominal use not only in L2 English adverbial – adjunct CP clauses (‘The student was upset because he had failed the test’), but also in English VP-coordination structures (‘Jane had studied hard and (she) passed the exam’), an area which has never been investigated before. While English adjunct CP clauses represent a context in which overt pronominal subjects are obligatory, in VP-coordination pronouns can be apparently dropped. These structures were tested by means of two English production tasks: a Sentence Completion task and a Cloze Test. Our results showed that compared to the English controls the Greek learners used (a) significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in adjunct CP clauses and, crucially, (b) significantly more overt pronominal subjects in VP-coordination structures. After examining two possible accounts for the observed optionality, namely, the Interface Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis, we argue that a language internal syntax explanation best addresses our data both in the adjunct CP clauses and in the VP-coordination structures.

Anaphoric biases of null and overt subjects in Italian and Spanish: a cross-linguistic comparison

The present study explores the cross-linguistic differences between Spanish and Italian in the anaphoric interpretation of null subjects and overt pronominal subjects. The availability of null subjects in a language is determined by the parametric settings of its syntax, but their felicitous use as an alternative to overt pronouns depends on contextual conditions affecting how different expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse. According to Accessibility Theory, at least some of these principles must have universal validity; however, up to now no experimental research has been carried out with the aim of comparing directly the interpretation of anaphoric dependencies in two typologically similar null subject languages. In this paper, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments carried out in Spanish and in Italian. The results show a similar pattern for the resolution of null subjects, as predicted by Accessibility Theory, whereas the resolution of overt pronouns seems to diverge. This suggests that subtle differences restricted to the scope of the overt pronoun yield systematic variation between the two languages.

Child L2 development of syntactic and discourse properties of Spanish subjects

The apparent optionality in the use of null and overt pronominal subjects and the apparently free word order or distribution of preverbal and postverbal subjects in Spanish obey a number of discourse–pragmatic constraints which play an important role in Spanish L2 subject development. Although research on subject properties at the syntax–discourse interface has been conducted in adult L2A and bilingual L1A, child L2A has not been extensively explored in this respect. This paper explores the L2 development of syntactic and discourse properties of subjects by British child L2 learners of Spanish in the context of a Spanish immersion school and in three different age groups, namely five-, ten- and seventeen-year-old children whose age of first exposure was at four years old, and in three corresponding control groups. Research is carried out by means of grammaticality and preference judgment experimental tasks and results suggest that children can indeed acquire the syntactic properties of Spanish subjects, although not fully in the case of the first two age groups, while the acquisition of discourse properties seems to be delayed and remains problematic even for the older/more advanced group, as has been suggested for adult L2 learners.

Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian

This article reports the results of experiments targeting the production and interpretation of postverbal subjects, and null and overt pronominal subjects, by near-native speakers of Italian whose native language is English. The results directly bear on both theoretical issues and developmental acquisition questions. It is argued that properties related to the null-subject parameter are sensitive to discourse factors that determine the use of both postverbal subjects and pronominal subjects. More specifically, it is claimed that the availability of null pronominal subjects and the availability of postverbal subjects do not necessarily correlate. The near-native grammars analyzed here illustrate a special instance of this lack of correlation. Furthermore, near-natives show non-native-like behavior in the use of postverbal subjects, and in the overuse of overt pronominal subjects in tensed clauses. The proposal is put forward that, although resetting of the null-subject parameter has taken place in the speakers’ L2 Italian grammar, the relevant L1 computations are preserved and accessed in L2 use, without violating any formal conditions; this is the source of non-target behavior. The analysis proposed exploits cartographic insights on discourse-related computations, and suggests that the principles of economy may be instantiated differently in native and near-native grammars.

Cross-linguistic influence in the interpretation of anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns in English–Italian bilingual children

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English–Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed in the choice of a subject antecedent for null anaphoric pronouns, and only marginally significant differences were reported between the adults and the two groups of children for the interpretation of null cataphoric pronouns. By contrast, overt pronominal subjects were accepted as co-referential with a subject antecedent significantly more often by the bilingual children than by the monolingual children and the adults in the anaphoric condition, and both groups of children accepted a subject as the antecedent of an overt cataphoric pronoun significantly more often than the adults. These results are interpreted in the context of language-universal and language-specific processing strategies in anaphora resolution in bilingual and monolingual acquisition.

Crosslinguistic influence at the syntax–pragmatics interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition

The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

First language attrition and syntactic subjects: A study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English

In this paper we present some results from an experimental study that we have been conducting into the effects of syntactic attrition on the L1 of Greek and Italian speakers who have achieved near-native proficiency in their L2 (English) but still use their L1 on a regular basis. In particular, we test the hypothesis, developed on the basis of assumptions regarding syntactic modularity, that the changes in L1 syntax will be restricted to the interface with the conceptual /intentional cognitive systems. The area of investigation is the domain of grammatical subjects in Greek and Italian. More specifically, we tested the participants on the production and interpretation of null and overt subjects, and of preverbal and postverbal subjects. We also elicited grammaticality judgments on subject extraction and subject position in various syntactic contexts. In this paper we report on the results of one of the production tasks (of preverbal and postverbal subjects) and two interpretation tasks. Attrition effects are found in the production of preverbal subjects in the Greek group whereas Italian speakers show attrition effects in the interpretation of overt pronominal subjects. We argue that these results are in the right direction, that is, that semantic features are vulnerable in language attrition whereas syntactic options remain intact.