Pro-drop Language Research Articles

Synchronic and diachronic aspects of overt subject raising in English

This paper attempts to account for synchronic and diachronic aspects of overt subject raising in English by incorporating the notion ‘subject of predication’ as a feature checking relation. First, it is argued that the ‘subject of predication’ feature originates in v, and because of its effects on semantic interpretation, it requires a full nominal subject, not only its formal features, in [Spec, TP], thereby motivating overt subject raising in Present-day English. Then, by examining the distribution of overt subject raising in the history of English, it is claimed, extending Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou's (1998) analysis of referential pro-drop languages like Greek and Spanish, that the “rich” verbal agreement of Old and Middle English, which is not rich enough to license referential pro-drop, serves to satisfy the EPP feature of T via overt verb raising, but not the ‘subject of predication’ feature of v. This enables us to account for the freer distribution of unaccusative subjects in Old and Middle English than in Present-day English, and to attribute their changing distribution to the loss of the “rich” verbal agreement in the sixteenth century.

Noun versus verb emphasis in Italian mother-to-child speech.

This paper examines naturalistic adult-to-child speech produced by 15 Italian middle-class mothers to determine which specific patterns characterize linguistic input to children at 1;4 and 1;8. Since Italian is a pro-drop language, we expect that adult-to-child speech will show a bias towards a more salient semantic and morphological significance of verbs relative to nouns. We expect that verbs will more likely occupy the sentence-initial position, and have more morphological inflections relative to nouns. Mother-to-child speech was coded for type and token frequency, utterance position, and morphological variation of nouns and verbs. The results confirm our predictions. Namely, Italian-speaking mothers produced verb types and tokens more frequently than noun types and tokens, they placed verbs more frequently than nouns in salient utterance position, and they morphologically marked verb stems more than noun stems.

Occurrence and identification of implicit arguments in Hungarian

In English many verbs can occur with either an overt argument or one that is lexically unrealized. To account for this phenomenon some researchers (e.g. Fillmore, 1986; Goldberg, 1995) have argued that the omissibility is lexically defined. On the other hand, Groefsema (1995) has proposed a semantic/pragmatic explanation: an argument can be left implicit if the verb puts a selection restriction on the argument such that it gives a relevant interpretation, or if the rest of the utterance makes a relevant interpretation immediately accessible. Hungarian, similarly to other pro-drop languages, allows implicit arguments far more freely than English does. In my paper, I examine this freer occurrence of implicit arguments on the basis of a 310 minute long spoken corpus. I demonstrate that Groefsema's two proposals are also valid in Hungarian. However, there are many instances where implicit arguments cannot be identified by Groefsema's two proposals. In Hungarian an argument can also be left implicit if extending its immediate context leads to a relevant interpretation. The conclusion of my investigation is that Hungarian verbs do not vary as to whether they can occur with implicit arguments, but they vary as to in what manner or in what context they can occur with them.

Left dislocated subjects and the pro-drop parameter: A case study of Spanish

Abstract The typical assumption in a pro-drop language like Spanish is that covert as well as overt subjects occupy a preverbal position at Spell Out in which their case and agreement properties are satisfied. This paper presents evidence against such a claim. On the one hand, we show that pre-verbal overt subjects pattern with left dislocated DOs and IOs in a wide range of syntactic contexts: ellipsis, extraction of quantifiers and interpretation of preverbal quantifiers. In these same contexts, sentences with a silent subject differ from sentences with overt ones. We conclude that overt pre-verbal subjects are necessarily left dislocated. In order to account for the left dislocated nature of overt subjects, we propose to eliminate AgrS as a functional projection. Instead we take the idea that subject agreement should be considered a clitic (Taraldsen, 1992), and the relation between the agreement and subject to be one of clitic doubling. Evidence in favor of this claim comes from striking parallelisms between standard clitic doubling constructions and agreement-subject constructions. Specifically, both cases pattern similarly in relation to the determination of binding in certain cases of mismatches in person between the doubling DP and the clitic. Since we take agreement to be a clitic that absorbs theta role and case, movement of the doubling DP subject to a preverbal position cannot be driven by agreement or case reasons. Instead, movement of the subject to a pre-verbal position is driven by discourse considerations as is typical in left dislocations.

Empty Subjects in Finnish and Hebrew

Finnish and Hebrew (in most tenses) share an unusual mixed subject omission pattern: the subject NP is optional in the first and second person but is generally required in the third person. A unified analysis of the two languages is developed in this paper, using certain proposals of Minimalism and a licensing principle which requires that both the specifier and the head position of a projection must be filled. In addition to the null subject pattern, Finnish and Hebrew differ both from traditional pro-drop and from non- pro-drop languages in the patterning of the agreement paradigm; the analysis developed here provides a connection between the mixed null subject pattern and the special agreement paradigm.

Minimal Restrictions on Basque Movements

This article discusses a long-known restriction on Wh-movement in Basque, describing it in terms of barriers. In essence, Wh-movement is impossible across a morphologically-expressed specifier, while it is possible across a corresponding null pronominal. It is argued that this restriction holds more generally for any category that licenses null arguments in pro-drop languages. The paper then accounts for the descriptive restriction in Minimalist terms, deriving barrier requirements from independently required derivational dynamics. In particular, an attracted feature F, related to a functional projection K containing ‘heavy’ agreement, forces an ancillary morphological repair to apply to the category α which F comes from. This morphological repair results in K being spelled-out and consequently frozen (as a sort of compound) for further syntactic computation; islands (or barriers) emerge as a consequence of the Spell-out of K. An account is also provided for why A-movement is possible across a morphologically-expressed specifier (in contrast to A'-movement). Apart from having consequences for the proper statement of various mechanisms assumed within the Minimalist Program, the analysis constitutes strong evidence for this system in its radically derivational variant (with Spell-out applying repeatedly when convergence demands it), inasmuch as it provides a natural way to understand barriers as a dynamic property of derivational syntax.

Topic-drop versus pro-drop: null subjects and pronominal subjects in the Spanish L2 of Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese speakers

Recent developments within the so-called Principles and Parameters model of acquisition argue for a clear-cut separation of Universal Grammar (UG) principles from parametric options and locate all parameters within functional categories (Borer, 1984; Lebeaux, 1988; Chomsky, 1991). This has led Tsimpli and Roussou (1991) to propose that adult L2 (second language) learners have access to UG principles but do not reset the parameters of the L2, which amounts to saying that null subjects in the adult Spanish L2 may or may not have the same status as native Spanish null subjects, depending on the speakers’ L1 (first language) and the UG principles at stake. In the case of L1 acquisition, Rizzi (1994) and Hyams (1994) provide a competence account of null subjects in early child English which relate them to adult English Diary Drop and German-style topic-drop rather than to Spanish-style pro-drop. They specifically argue that these missing subjects are restricted to the first position of non- wh root clauses and that fixing the null subject parameter will consist of incorporating the ROOT=CP principle into this grammar. In this paper, we analyse the Spanish L2 oral spontaneous data produced by adult L1 speakers of pro-drop and topic-drop languages in an attempt to provide a competence account of null subjects in adult nonnative Spanish. Our data show that, unlike early English grammars, all the Spanish non-native grammars contain null subjects both in matrix and subordinate clauses, and that this is the case at the early and advanced stages. It also shows that many non-native pronominal subjects do not have the same value as native Spanish subjects and that subject pronouns are used for identification purposes. It is suggested that these data provide evidence for a model of L2 acquisition where adult non-native grammar construction resorts to a default licensing procedure which allows null pronouns provided they can be identified.

Agreement and pro-drop in some dialects of English

In this paper, we consider data from a number of English dialects in which the distribution of pronouns and verb inflection differs radically from that in standard English. In these dialects, pronouns adjacent to the verb occur with an uninflected form of the verb, at least for some types of subjects and some subset of verbs. Pronouns that are separated from the verb or immediately follow it, on the other hand, occur with an inflected verb form. We provide an analysis of these constructions within lexical-functional grammar (LFG) in which the pronouns occurring with the uninflected form are analyzed as pro-clitics to the verb. Given this analysis of pronouns as verbal inflection, the constructions in which they occur lack an overt subject and can hence be referred to as pro-drop constructions. We examine a property that has frequently been associated with pro-drop languages - the COMP-trace effect - but find the link between the two properties too weak to be relevant to our discussion. Finally, we consider briefly the implications of the LFG analysis of this phenomenon for diachronic aspects of the data

La sintassi del soggetto nel quadro minimalista. Riflessioni su EPP e pro-drop

Under the radical shift of perspective due to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), many theoretical principles of the generative framework need to be revised and deeply rethought. This paper proposes a reflection about the impact of this new revolution on two central aspects of subject syntax, namely the Extended Projection Principle and the Null Subject Parameter. The paper is articulated through the comparison of a number of typological unrelated languages : 1) S(...)V non pro-drop languages, such as English, French and German ; 2) pro-drop languages such as Italian ; 3) VS languages such as Irish. This brief survey leads us to conclude that both aspects of Subject syntax cannot be derived under the most elementary mechanisms of minimalism. They remain on the contrary two autonomous components of the theory : EPP a primitive of Universal Grammar concerning the domain of Tense ; pro-drop an independent parameter defined in terms of activation of a specific functional projection : AgrP

‘Pragmatic weight’ and Spanish subject pronouns: The pragmatic and discourse uses of ‘tú’ and ‘yo’ in spoken Madrid Spanish

Spanish is a pro-drop language in which first and second person subject pronouns are frequently omitted (80%); traditionally the function of overt subject pronouns has been regarded as adding emphasis or to contrast explicit statements. I argue that their function is more similar to that of topicalized NPs, referred to as X-Forms by Klein-Andreu (1989a,b), and that their appearance is governed by their conversational function as discourse topics; they are used pragmatically and meta-linguistically to switch reference, for purposes of emphasis and negotiating conversational turns, and to add ‘pragmatic weight’ to frames of reference, epistemic parentheticals and potential speech act verbs. I introduce the notion of ‘pragmatic weight’ as a label that describes the ways in which subject pronouns are used to signal utterances as ‘less abstract’ or ‘more personally relevant’. Finally, some predictions are made as to what this description of the use of subject pronouns may imply for other, structurally similar pro-drop languages.

Verb argument information used in a prodrop language: An experimental study in Japanese

Japanese is an SOV, head-final language with phonologically null arguments. Due to these characteristics, any (or all) of the arguments classified by a verb may be null. Consequently, verb argument information which Japanese readers/listeners receive overtly is sometimes incomplete. Furthermore, the arguments in a string may or may not belong to the same clause, and the disambiguating verb argument information does not become available until the end of a clause. These characteristics pose a question of whether or not verb argument information is a useful source of information for on-line syntactic processing in Japanese. An experiment using three types of complex NPs was designed specifically to examine whether Japanese readers use the argument structure information, or alternatively, they simply use “minimal attachment” in on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous structures. The reading times of three types of complex NPs suggest that native speakers of Japanese indeed utilize verb argument information, and they do so immediately. This finding supports the hypothesis that the Japanese language is processed in the similar way to English in that verb argument information functions as an important source of information in on-line processing. The difference between processing English and processing Japanese is that the former has a mechanism which keeps track of null arguments as well as overt ones.

Haitian Creole

Haitian Creole has been argued to be a pro-drop language whose null subjects are licensed by syntactic clitics (DeGraff 1993). This paper analyzes the properties of Haitian Creole pronominal subjects, expletive and argumentai, and argues on the basis of syntactic, phonological, and comparative considerations that Haitian Creole is better analyzed as a language whose argumentai subjects cannot be null and whose pronominal subjects occur in argumentai positions and cliticize in the phonological component.

Linguistic modularity? A case study of a ‘Savant’ linguist

We provide a preliminary report on a young man who is institutionalised because he is unable to look after himself, but who has a remarkable talent for acquiring and using foreign languages. After documenting the breadth of his expertise across some sixteen languages, we investigate his command of his native language, English, and the extent to which his linguistic competence is integrated into his general cognitive ability, and we briefly discuss the implications of these results for Fodor's modularity hypothesis. The results of the experiments devised to test these aspects of his linguistic and inferential abilities then provide the basis for a more detailed analysis of his command of one specific language, Modern Greek. We concentrate on properties associated with the pro-drop parameter, in particular that-t effects and the possibility of post-verbal subjects, contrasting his performance in Greek, a pro-drop language, with English, a non-pro-drop language. The pattern of results obtained indicate that he is not acquiring a ‘first’ language several times over, but it remains for future investigation to determine how characteristic of normal second-language learners his acquisition is. We also tentatively interpret his performance in Greek as evidence in favour of the claim that the phenomena associated with the pro-drop parameter do constitute a natural class, and specifically provide support for Rizzi's revision of the parameter in terms of relativised minimality. We emphasize that these results are preliminary and hope to refine and extend our analyses in subsequent contributions.

O parametro pro - drop e a aquisicao de segunda lingua

Within the Government and Binding theory (GB), it is assumed the man is equipped with some innate language structure, Universal Grammar (UG), which contains a set of inviolable principles plus some open parameters which are set by experience. One such universal principle is the Empty Category Principle (ECP), which states that an empty category must be properly governed. There are some languages which seem to violate the ECP. These languages present some properties related to missing subjects, which are said to be part of a parameter, the Pro-Drop Parameter. To overcome problems with the ECP, GB theory explains the Pro-Drop Parameter as being one of the ways by which languages may vary-the variation being, in this case, with respect to the governing relation of subject and verb The child, equipped with UG and exposed to a language such as English, sets the parameter as to not allow (phonologically) null subjects. The parameter will be set differently if the child is exposed to a language that allows null subjects. An interesting question arises when we think about the L2 learner. If L2 acquisition is a process similar to LI acquisition, we may assume the L2 learner has some access to UG. My research investigates this question. In the case of native speakers of English learning Spanish (a Pro-Drop language), I hypothesized that: a) if the L2 learner has some access to UG, after being exposed to L2 data he will know there is an apparent violation of the ECP; b) acquisition of the Pro-Drop Parameter should imply the acquisition of the related cluster of properties. The subjects in this experiment were asked to give grammatical judgments to sentences containing the parameter properties. The results strongly suggest the accessibility of UG for adult L2 learners when one specific claim of the theory is considered.

Der

This paper presents a unified account of the distribution of Danishderwithin the framework of Government and Binding, analyzingderas a subject filler. The existence of empty subjects in cases of extraction out of embedded questions is explained by assuming proper government by AGR, not due to verbal inflection as in pro-drop languages, but rather due to the absorption by AGR of the features of an empty co-superscripted postverbal position.