Referential Null Subjects in Early English

Abstract

This book offers a large-scale quantitative investigation of referential null subjects as they occur in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Using corpus linguistic methods, and drawing on five corpora of early English, the book empirically addresses the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, and excerpts of texts, spanning nearly 850 years of the history of English. The book gives an in-depth quantitative analysis of c.80,000 overt and null referential pronominal subjects in 181 Old English texts. On the basis of this substantial data material, the book re-evaluates previous conflicting claims concerning the occurrence and distribution of null subjects in Old English. The book critically addresses the question of whether the earliest stage of English can be considered a canonical or partial pro-drop language. It also provides an empirical examination of the role played by central licensors of null subjects proposed in the theoretical literature, including verbal agreement and Aboutness topicality. The predictions of two important pragmatic accounts of null arguments are also tested. In order to provide a longitudinal perspective, results are provided from an investigation of c.139,000 overt and null referential pronominal subjects occurring in more than 300 Middle and Early Modern English texts and text samples. Throughout, the book builds its arguments by means of powerful statistical tools, including generalized fixed-effects and mixed-effects logistic regression modelling, and is the most comprehensive examination so far provided of null subjects in the history of English.

Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives.

“…Moreover, she points out that the Hildebrandslied, an entirely autochthonous text, features five instances of null subjects as opposed to 29 overt pronouns. The other early West Germanic languages, Old English and Old Saxon, also display similar distributions of null subjects in both autochthonous and translated texts (Rosenkvist 2009;van Gelderen 2013;Rusten 2013Rusten , 2015Rusten , 2019Walkden 2013Walkden , 2014. Though translation is likely to have had an effect on the frequency of null subjects, then, it cannot be the whole story.…”