Agreement syncretization and the loss of null subjects: quantificational models for Medieval French

Abstract

This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero

“…This can be understood as further contribution to Torres Cacoullos and Travis’ (2019) general idea that functional factors relevant for referential choice may be quite similar across languages, but the specific response to these factors can differ drastically, yielding the—in this sense somewhat misleading—impression of stark contrasts in this regard, as reflected in the null-subject versus nonnull-subject typology. In regards to our second research question, we conclude that the rudimentary form of subject agreement plays a major role in determining the form of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a, thus lending further support to Taraldsen's Generalization (Seo, 2001; Simonenko & Crabbé, 2019; Taraldsen, 1978) and Nichols’ (2018) complementarity hypothesis : regardless of some redundancy in the combination of pronouns with agreement in the predicate, subject features tend to be expressed only once in a clause, and tend to be zero only where respective features are marked transparently within verbal predicates, as found by, for instance, Rosenkvist (2018) or Fuβ (2005) for some Germanic and Romance dialects of Europe. While findings from these previous studies relate primarily to syncretisms in verbal paradigms and differences across tense-specific subparadigms, we find the rudimentary form of subject agreement as restricted to only one aspectual category to be relevant.…”

“…A similar factor, but not entirely excluding functional considerations, is the co-presence of subject-predicate agreement. This is relevant in the sense of what is known as Taraldsen's Generalization (Taraldsen, 1978; see Seo [2001:Chapter 2] or Simonenko & Crabbé [2019] for discussion) or Nichols’ (2018) complementarity hypothesis , whereby pronouns are more likely where agreement is absent or not sufficiently transparent, thus ensuring marking of relevant features at least once but never more than once (Meyerhoff [2009:309] on Tamambo versus Bislama) (cf., Table 2). This latter aspect of morphological structure is discussed under the heading of Morphological Uniformity after Jaegli and Safir (1989) and has been subject to corpus-linguistic work on Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages.…”

“…This latter aspect of morphological structure is discussed under the heading of Morphological Uniformity after Jaegli and Safir (1989) and has been subject to corpus-linguistic work on Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages. For instance, Fuß (2005) and Rosenkvist (2018) found that pronouns are significantly more frequent in subjects where verb forms are less transparent (and hence less informative) due to syncretism in a number of Romance and Germanic varieties, respectively (cf., also Simonenko & Crabbé [2019] for its relevance in the history of subject expression in French). Similarly, Seo (2001:165) found a higher frequency of subject pronouns with preterit tense than with present tense predicates in Russian, where only the latter show subject agreement in person and number; her data also show significant differences across parallel corpora from Russian and four other Slavic languages in this regard, so that the rate of zero subjects is higher in the latter languages that also show verbal subject agreement in person and number in all tenses.…”

Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives.

“…characterization of the Old French facts has been revisited and disputed in various works (Roberts 1993;Vance 1997;Salvesen 2014;Zimmermann 2014Zimmermann , 2018Simonenko et al 2018), a debate which lies outside the focus of the present paper. Instead we will focus on the analysis and its cross-linguistic applicability.…”

Subjects tend to be coded only once: Corpus-based and grammar-based evidence for an efficiency-driven trade-off

“…It may be that both causal paths exist (both within Slavic and universally). Simonenko et al (2019) addressed the question of directionality, performing a diachronic study on Medieval French. They show that the syncretization of verbal endings (which is presumably phonologicallydriven and eventually leads to the near-disappearance of indexation) occurs at almost the same rates as the spread of pronominal subject encoding, which suggests that the two processes are likely to be related.…”