The morphosyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Old English
Chapter 4 provides an in-depth quantitative investigation of the morpohsyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Old English. The distribution of overt and null subjects is presented according to the structural variables of clause type, the position of the finite verb, person, and number. Attempts are made to fit an explanatory generalized mixed-effects logistic regression model incorporating these linguistic variables, as well as those non-linguistic variables which emerged as significant in Chapter 3. It is demonstrated that correlations between the occurrence of null subjects and such variables are extremely weak when both genre and the individual text are taken into account: only minuscule influence on the odds of having a null subject instead of an overt one is exercised by these variables. It is argued that this strengthens the view of null subjects in Old English as linguistic ‘residue’.