Null Subjects in Old English

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
English I

I review the proposal made by Sigurðsson (2011) that null arguments follow from third-factor principles, as in Chomsky 2005 . A number of issues remain unclear: for instance, the kind of topic that licenses null arguments in Modern Germanic, including Modern English. I argue that Old English is pro drop and add to the discussion Frascarelli (2007) started as to which topic licenses a null subject. I agree with Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) that the licensing topic in Modern Germanic and Old English is an aboutness-shift topic. I also argue that verb movement to C is necessary to license the empty argument in the modern Germanic languages (including Modern English), but not in Old English, since agreement is still responsible for licensing in that language, as in Italian.

Null subjects

2019 ◽  
pp. 191-300
Author(s):  
Ian Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Null Pronouns ◽  
General Account ◽  
Article System ◽  
Historical Sketch

After a brief historical sketch of work on null subjects, and a summary of Barbosa’s proposals concerning the relation between partial and radical null subjects, the chapter presents a typology of null arguments which links their properties directly to the D-system, suggesting a cross-linguistic link between the nature of the null-subject system and the nature of the ‘article system’ in a given language. After a brief consideration of the semantics of null pronouns and the role of the Person feature in licensing null arguments, a general account of ‘licensing pro’ is put forward, which relies on the twin ideas that pro contains a variable and that all variables must be bound at the C–I interface. Finally, there is an updated and refined parameter hierarchy for φ‎-parameters. The question of the relation of variation in these features to the C–I interface and the morphophonological interface is also taken up.

scholarly journals Nullsubjekte im Mittelniederdeutschen

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Farasyn ◽  
Anne Breitbarth
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
North West ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Low German ◽  
Middle Low German ◽  
Germanic Languages

AbstractIn spite of growing interest in recent years, the syntax of Middle Low German (MLG) remains an extremely underresearched area. In light of recent research showing early North West Germanic languages to be partial null subject languages (Axel 2005; Walkden 2014; Kinn 2016; Volodina/Weiß 2016), the question arises where MLG is positioned in this respect. The present article presents novel data showing that MLG had referential null subjects (RNS) and can be classified as a partial null subject language. Based on a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of their syntactic distribution, we argue that two types of RNS must be distinguished in MLG, null topics in SpecCP and null clitics on C.

scholarly journals Null subjects in Middle English

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE WALKDEN ◽  
KRISTIAN A. RUSTEN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Old English ◽  
Complete Disappearance ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Middle English Poetry ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Shed Light

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from thePenn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Proseand the newParsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

pro as a Minimal nP: Toward a Unified Approach to Pro-Drop

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pilar P. Barbosa
Keyword(s):  
Basic Mechanism ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Argument Position ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Existential Closure ◽  
Bare Nominal ◽  
Null Element ◽  
Type Shifting

In this article, I examine the properties of the partial null subject languages (NSLs) when compared with the consistent and the discourse pro-drop languages and argue that the same basic mechanism underlies pro-drop in partial as well as discourse pro-drop: namely, null NP anaphora, as originally proposed in Tomioka 2003 for discourse pro-drop. The two sets of languages show a correlation between the occurrence of null arguments and the availability of a bare nominal in argument position. I suggest that the null element is a default, minimally specified nominal—the same item that arguably appears as a complement of D in pronouns. It is a proform that minimally consists of the categorizing head n, lacking a root, the meaning of which is ‘entity’ (a property that is trivially true of any individual in the domain). nP introduces a variable that may be bound under Existential Closure, yielding the impersonal interpretation; otherwise, its denotation is type-shifted to an individual (ɩ) under the appropriate conditions. The crosslinguistic differences found in the interpretation of the null subject depend on the resources available in particular languages for application of ɩ type-shifting: the (bare NP) languages that lack such resources only have quasi-argumental and impersonal null subjects (semi pro-drop languages). Finally, I show that the idea that pro reduces to [nP e] can also be successfully extended to the consistent NSLs, provided it is assumed that, in this type of NSL, the head bearing agreement morphology bears a D-feature and interpretable ϕ-features.

On Null Subjects and Null Arguments

1993 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Law
Keyword(s):  
Subject Position ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Null Arguments ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Subject Extraction

In the literature on Null Subject Languages (NSLs) since Rizzi (1982), the three properties that are commonly thought to be connected are (i) the richness of inflectional morphology, (ii) free subject inversion, and (iii) the COMP-trace effect. The connection between them is that if a language (e.g., Italian) has the option of having a null subject (NS) pronominalproin subject position (i.e., SpecIP) as a result of having rich inflectional (i.e., verbal agreement) morphology, as represented in (1a), then the same element may appear in the same position in cases of subjects occurring postverbally as in (1b) and in cases of long-distance subject extraction where the postverbal trace is properly governed by the verb, as in (1c):

The morphosyntactic characteristics of null subjects in Old English

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-122
Author(s):  
Kristian A. Rusten
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Regression Model ◽  
Old English ◽  
Logistic Regression Model ◽  
Mixed Effects ◽  
Linguistic Variables ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Structural Variables ◽  
The Individual

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’.

Valency changes in the history of English

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly van Gelderen
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
The Other ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
History Of ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
English I

This article examines changes in the valency marking in the history of English. I start with a discussion of the typological literature on measuring basic valency and point out the problems with such an approach. A sample of 18 Old English verbs provides no basic valency pattern for Old English; this makes Old English different from the other Germanic languages. I then review the evidence, presented in, for instance, Visser (1963), that there is an increase in transitivity in the history of English and argue that this increase is partly due to verbs ceasing to mark Theme-preserving alternations, between anticausative and causative. I also examine Theme-changing alternations, between intransitive and transitive, and argue that, due to the changes in aspect marking, objects become licensed by a light verb, v. I conclude by suggesting a syntactic structure that accounts for the various stages of English and argue that the main changes are due to an increase in morphological intransparency.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Kristian A. Rusten
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
The Status

This chapter introduces the issues to be investigated in the book. It defines the concept of referential null subject, and gives an outline of previous statements concerning the status of such subjects in Old English, as well as a presentation of the null subject phenomenon as it manifests itself in the wider Old Germanic context. Previous works on null subjects in Old English have reached widely diverging conclusions: some scholars say that null subjects did not occur in Old English, while others state that Old English was a canonical pro-drop language. Walkden (2013) suggested the compromise that null subjects are a case of diatopic variation. The question of the possibility of null subjects in Old English, and the diverging descriptions and explanations of this phenomenon, are presented as the main motivations for the book. The chapter also introduces the data material and methods used.

Pro-drop in interrogatives across older Germanic and Romance languages

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-136
Author(s):  
Federica Cognola ◽  
George Walkden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Interrogative Clauses ◽  
Germanic Languages

This chapter investigates the mechanisms of null subject licensing in direct interrogatives, an environment which is generally neglected in investigation into null subjects, using data from a range of early Romance and Germanic languages considered to be asymmetric pro-drop languages, i.e. languages in which null subjects are favoured in main clauses. We find that there is subtle variation between the languages in question, but that two factors in particular – interrogative type and person – are crucial in conditioning this variation, and we sketch analyses based on the differential availability of Agree relations with left-peripheral elements. Therefore, null subjects in main interrogative clauses are licensed in two slightly different manners in the two language families – a fact which we show follows from differences in the structure of their left periphery and in agreement morphology

scholarly journals Clause structure in Old English: evidence from Negative Concord

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Haeberli ◽  
Liliane Haegeman
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Landing Site ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Clause Structure ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
The One ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper deals with the clause structure of Old English. In the main body of the paper we adopt the ‘traditional’ analysis of the West Germanic languages in which it is proposed that VP is head-final. We will argue (contra Van Kemenade 1987, pace Cardinaletti & Roberts 1991, Pintzuk 1991, Tomaselli 1991) that the clause structure of Old English contains a head-initial functional projection whose head can be the landing site of verb movement in subordinate clauses. This claim is based on evidence related to the distribution and interpretation of negative elements in Old English and West Flemish. We will show that differences between these two languages with respect to Negative Concord phenomena can be accounted for straightforwardly in terms of an Old English clause structure which is different from the one traditionally proposed for the modern Germanic SOV/V2 languages.In the appendix to the paper we briefly turn to the recent alternative approaches to the phrase structure of SOV languages in terms of a universal base hypothesis where all projections are head-initial (see Kayne (1993), Zwart (1993), Roberts (1995) for a discussion of Old English).

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