Syntax Of Subjects Research Articles

Adding the microdimension to the study of language change in contact. Three case studies

Syntactic change in contact is generally explained as a result of cognitive, structural/typological, or sociolinguistic factors. However, the relative weight of these factors in shaping the outputs of contact is yet to be assessed. In this paper, we propose a microcontact approach to the study of change in contact, focusing on microsyntactic points of variation across multiple language pairs that are structurally very close. We show that this approach makes it possible to more accurately identify some of the factors that are involved in change. By considering three case studies centered on the syntax of subjects, objects, and indexicals, we show that the outputs of syntactic change in microcontact diverge from what is expected under otherwise solid generalizations (avoidance of indeterminacy, avoidance of silence, the Interface Hypothesis, a tendency towards simplification, and the general stability of the indexical domain) regarding change in contact. Microcontact offers a finer-grained point of observation, allowing us to go beyond broader typological assumptions and to focus on the link between structure and cognition. The results of our case studies demonstrate that the outputs of change in contact are an interplay between cognitive and structural factors (see also Muysken 2013 for additional processing considerations), and that the micro-variational dimension is crucial in drawing a precise picture of heritage language syntax.

Sujeitos nulos em inglês L2

The present article investigates the acquisition of a core syntactic property – the ungrammaticality of null subjects in English – by advanced and near-native learners whose first languages are European Portuguese (EP), a null subject language, and French, a non-null subject language. Two experimental tasks were used: an untimed drag-and-drop task and a speeded acceptability judgement task. Results show that French speakers behave target-like across all tasks and conditions, but EP speakers do not. At an advanced level, they fail to reject expletive and [-animate] null subjects in the speeded task. Crucially, at a near native level, EP speakers behave fully target-like across all conditions and tasks. These findings indicate that the syntax of subjects may exhibit significant developmental delays depending on first-second language combinations, but is completely acquirable. Developmental problems are argued to result from the misanalysis of (some of) the overt expletive subjects in the L2 input. This proposal is supported by an exploratory follow-up experiment, whose results are presented and discussed in the article.

Transitivity and Subject Positions in Old Irish

AbstractThis article is concerned with some fine‐grained distinctions in the syntax of subjects in Old Irish. Old Irish (7th–9th century) is typically described as a VSO language, but there are a number of sentences in the corpus in which the subject is not immediately after the subject. In this paper two case studies are conducted the results of which show that (a) non‐final late subjects are confined to non‐transitive and ‘atypical transitive’ clauses having the general form VXSY, and (b) the position of final late subjects in the schema VXS# can understood in descriptive terms as ‘right‐dislocated’ and motivated largely in information structure terms (i.e. Topic‐Comment, Focus‐Alternative), although a small residue of examples are similar to the VXSY‐type of case in being ‘atypical transitives’. The descriptive term ‘atypical transitive’ is introduced here to cover morphologically transitive clauses (with accusative marked direct objects nouns, or pronouns that can replace such nouns) that behave syntactically more like non‐transitive clauses. There are four types: negative clauses with bare indefinite objects, clauses with object‐oriented floating quantifiers, clauses in which a pronominal object serves to ‘detransitivize’ the verb, and clauses containing a verb of motion whose direct object is the goal of movement.

On The Syntax of Subjects in Brazilian Portuguese: Using the ‘SPLIT' Pronominal Sytem as the Basis for an Alternative Analysis

O objetivo deste artigo é investigar a sintaxe do Português Brasileiro (PB), desenvolvendo uma proposta unifcada para os casos de orações com sujeitos referenciais e não-referenciais, por um lado, e de orações do tipo tópico-sujeito, com ordem VS, com sujeito de terceira pessoa e interpretação genérica sem o pronome ‘se', com verbos existenciais e meteorológicos, em que, por hipótese, a posição de sujeito é preenchida por um sintagma locativo (temporal/ espacial) manifesto ou nulo. Por hipótese, nesses contextos, o sujeito é preenchido por um DP/ pronome (nulo ou manifesto) com interpretação locativa (espacial/ temporal). Argumentamos que é possível entender os fatos relevantes se analisarmos o sistema pronominal/flexional do PB como sendo cindido em dois subsistemas: um, composto pela primeira e segunda pessoas, que são inerentemente defnidas/referenciais; e o outro, constituído pela terceira pessoa, que é subespecifcada para o traço defnido/referencial. A proposta que defendemos é que a divisão desse sistema pronominal/flexional constitui a chave para explicar a distribuição de sujeitos locativos (espaciais/temporais) manifestos e de sujeitos nulos de terceira pessoa em PB, tanto em oração matriz como em oração encaixada. Na discussão, apresentamos uma retrospectiva das análises mais representativas sobre a sintaxe do sujeito (manifesto e nulo) no PB, ressaltando que a falta de consenso em sua implementação teórica decorre dos recortes teóricos adotados (os quais são muitas vezes complementares), embora as contribuições sejam convergentes em relação às propriedades da terceira pessoa e ao papel da orientação para o discurso, o que respalda a unifcação presentemente proposta.

Topics, Subjects and Grammatical Change: from Classical to Modern European Portuguese

This paper presents a diachronic account of the syntax of subjects in Portuguese by comparing three different constructions -- active, canonical passives and SE-constructions -- relating the change in the position of subjects to the loss of V2. In the V2 grammar, in which the pre-verbal position is associated with fronted elements, and non-fronted subjects remain in post-verbal position, we see the same patterns of word order in SE-constructions as in active and canonical passive sentences; in the (X)SVO grammar, in which the subject is associated with the preverbal position and the fronted elements occupy the left periphery of the clause, active and canonical passives show a significant increase of pre-verbal subjects, whereas SE-constructions remain alike with respect to word order. We interpret this result as evidence for analyzing the internal argument of SE-constructions as a complement rather than a subject.

Adult instructed SLA of English subject properties

AbstractThe acquisition of subject properties in adult instructed L2 English by Spanish speakers still constitutes an area of difficulty, especially in situations of minimal exposure where explicit teaching of the syntax of subjects rarely occurs. By exploring the L2 learners’ intuitions and corrections of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing subject properties, this article contributes new cross-sectional data from adult learners at three stages of L2 development: beginners, intermediate, and advanced groups. The data show initial L1 transfer and subsequent developmental progress. Yet results are clearly not target-like even among advanced learners, which suggests that adult learners do not resort to parameter-resetting in instructed L2A and necessarily apply general learning mechanisms to adopt L2 structures with feature specifications different from those of their L1.

Embedded null subjects in Capeverdean

The status of Capeverdean as apro-drop language is controversial. Baptista (2002) contends that this Portuguese-based creole has null referential subjects with some types of predicates, while Pratas (2002, 2007) proposes that it has only expletive null subjects. She argues that the rare cases of root null subjects can be analyzed as instances of null expletives. The aim of this paper is to show that in Capeverdean there is an asymmetry in the distribution of null referential subjects. These are ruled out in root contexts, but allowed in some embedded contexts; this is the case when the null subject is bound by awh-operator or a quantifier. Following Holmberg's (2005) and Holmberg, Nayudu & Sheehan's (2009) analysis of null subjects, we offer an analysis of Capeverdean null subjects exploring the properties of T in the language (in particular, the lack of a rich inflectional system), the syntax of subjects, and the type of null category available. We claim that Capeverdean embedded null subjects are variables, licensed by an operator in the matrix clause. We show that these specific properties explain minimal differences between null subjects in Capeverdean and Brazilian Portuguese.

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.

Adverbs and the syntax of subjects in old french

Adverbs and the syntax of subjects in old french

The syntax of subjects in the acquisition of Spanish and Catalan

The research reported in this paper was partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia (Spain), grant no. BFF2000-0928 and grant no. BFF2000-0504.

Temporal dependency and the syntax of subjects

This article explores the interface between the syntactic and semantic representation of natural language with respect to the interpretation of time. The main claim of the paper is that the semantic relationship of temporal dependency requires syntactic locality at LF. Based on this claim, I explore the syntax and semantics of gerundive relative clauses. I argue that since gerundive relatives are temporally dependent on the tense of the main clause, they need to be local with a temporal element of the main clause at LF. I show that gerundive relatives receive different temporal interpretations depending on their syntactic position at LF. This analysis sheds light on the behavior of gerundive relatives in constructions involving coordination, existential there, scope of quantificational and cardinality adverbials, extraposition, presuppositionality effects and binding-theoretic reconstruction effects.