The Setting of the Null Subject Parameters across (Non-)Null-Subject Languages
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Null Subject Parameter(s)
2.1. Empirical Problems
(Gilligan 1989, p. 147) |
(Jaeggli and Safir 1989, pp. 29–30) |
2.2. Conceptual Problems
2.3. Reshaping the Classical View
(Roberts 2019, pp. 237, 241) |
(Gilligan 1989, 80) |
3. Null Subject Parameter Setting under the BCC-Account
(Biberauer and Roberts 2016, p. 11) |
- The child has a template in which uninterpretable features are matched to interpretable features. This will be important, for example, for the child to match null subjects to T’s uninterpretable features;
- FFs are not pre-given in the grammar: the child postulates them according to the input;
- There are mechanisms used to parse the input and optimize the learning task. Those are: Feature Economy (FE) and Input Generalization (IG);6
- This account assumes that children can infer morphological paradigms early, incorporating phi-features into their grammar.
4. Missing Subjects in Children Acquiring NNSLs
4.1. The Diary Drop Hypothesis
(Nariyama 2004, pp. 246–47) |
Guasti (2016) |
4.2. Root Infinitives
(25) | Optional Infinitive Stage |
a. Finite sentences are sometimes used; | |
b. Nonfinite sentences are sometimes used; | |
c. Finite and nonfinite verbs show up in the appropriate positions; | |
d. Case and finiteness properties follow from the ATOM; 14 | |
e. NS/OI holds, that is, ATOM does not hold for null-subject languages (children acquiring NSLs do not go through an OI stage). |
(26) | Models explaining the Optional Infinitive Stage |
a. Underspecification of TNS Wexler (1992); | |
b. Omission of functional layers Rizzi (1994); | |
c. Underspecification of AGR/TNS Schütze andWexler (1996); | |
d. Underspecification of number Hoekstraet al. (1996). |
Berber | |
Ouhalla (1993) |
5. The Acquisition of Radical Null Subject Languages
6. The Acquisition of Partial and Consistent Null-Subject Languages
6.1. Definite Null Subjects in PNSLs
6.2. Definite Null Subjects in CNSLs
6.3. Generic Null Subjects in PNSLs
6.3.1. Spontaneous Production
(Simões 1999, p. 126) |
(Magalhães 2006, p. 137) |
(Torn-Leesik and Vija 2012, p. 252) |
(Torn-Leesik and Vija 2012, p. 259) |
6.3.2. Comprehension
As you already noticed, this school is very weird. One of the rules is that just one of the students, Joaquim, has to eat dessert during lunch time instead of regular food.
Look at Bruno! He brought a salad to eat for lunch. Look, he is eating the salad now!
Mariana brought cheese balls to eat for lunch. Look she is eating cheese balls! Look at Lucas! He is eating pasta!
At first Joaquim put a sandwich in his lunchbox, but then he remembered the rule that he had to bring dessert for lunch. So he brought a brigadeiro instead. Look, he is eating a brigadeiro.21
Now Elmo is going to tell us a part of the story. Let’s see whether he paid attention or not.
Elmo:
7. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | Glossing abbreviations: 3 = third person, acc = accusative, comp = complementizer, f = feminine, imprs = impersonal, inf = infinitive, nom = nominative, pl = plural, ptcp = participle, ptv = partitive, sg = singular. | ||
2 | Here, “generic null subject” refers specifically to 3SG environments. As noted by an anonymous reviewer, CNSLs may well allow generic null subjects with a 2SG or 3PL verb, and/or with impersonal or mediopassive constructions. For present purposes, however, the key point is that CNSLs generally disallow 3SG generic null subjects (which will be analyzed as resulting from D-to-T incorporation). | ||
3 | The typology here described is not exhaustive. There are microvariations not covered by Table 1. Roberts (2019) gives as example the Northern Italo-Romance dialects, which do not quite behave as CNSLs, having a more restricted pattern of definite null subjects (which he attributes to their clitic system). | ||
4 | As noted by a reviewer, indirect evidence is not the only way children could figure out whether their language allows complementizer-trace effects violations or not: they could start with the assumption that their language does not have complementizer-trace violations and then wait for possible counterevidence in the input. However, indirect learning might be the most viable mechanism in which children acquire complementizer-trace proprieties. As shown by Chacón et al. (2015), instances of complementizer-trace effects violations are rare in the input in Spanish and Italian, contrasting with instances of postverbal subjects (a property which could lead the learner to infer that their language allows complementizer-trace violations), which are much more common in the input. If frequency is a relevant factor in language acquisition, the learner is more likely to use indirect evidence in this case. | ||
5 | An anonymous reviewer pointed out that Afrikaans and English should be a problem for the idea that NNSLs have D in D0, as these languages do not mark gender and number in determiners. However, what seems crucial to Roberts (2019) is that all NNSLs, including English and Afrikaans, have definite and indefinite determiners, which makes all them to have D in D0. | ||
6 | An anonymous reviewer was concerned with how the child would be able to parse a sentence despite having the ‘wrong’ parameter value. The concern alludes to Valian (1990) and the canonical Null Subject Parameter model. In the canonical model, the child is born with an English-like grammar or with an Italian-like grammar. Based on the Subset Principle, he/she should have an English-like grammar. The problem, according to Valian (1990), is that a child learning Italian, if born with an English-like grammar, will be unable to parse strings without subjects, because his/her parse is fed by an English-like grammar which is blind to null subjects. I believe this problem does not arise in the model I assume here, because the child is not born with a particular grammar. Children will be looking for ways to fullfill the [iF]/[uF] template, for example, by matching verbal agreement with null subjects when they are found in the input, or by not doing it when they are not found. | ||
7 | |||
8 | |||
9 | That is not entirely true. Finnish is not a NNSL, but a PNSL, and yet it has an overt expletive: sitä a partitive form of the pronoun se, classified as a there-type, pure expletive Holmberg and Nikanne (2002). | ||
10 | Under the BCC-view, ‘setting the null subject parameter’ is best translated as ‘learning the right feature values’. However, for simplicity, I will use the shorthand phrase ‘setting’ (or ‘missetting’) the null subject parameter. | ||
11 | |||
12 | However, examples of RIs occurring in wh-questions have been restricted to English. | ||
13 | Observe that for English, the percentage of missing subjects with finite verbs is higher than with nonfinite ones, which is markedly different from other languages. The English-speaking children represented in the graph are Eve and Adam. Eve produces very few missing subjects, both in finite and nonfinite clauses. Adam produces more null subjects in finite clauses than in nonfinite ones, but the difference is just 9%. For English, only third-person singular verbs were counted because other verbal forms lack inflection, and so do not inform whether the child produced a RI or not. This might have had an effect on the overall count, since what maybe was an RIs in second-, first-person or third-person plural were left aside. For more discussion, see Hoekstra and Hyams (1998). | ||
14 | ATOM stands for “AGR/TNS omission model”. Schütze and Wexler (1996) assume that AGR and/or TNS may be deleted by the child. If AGR is deleted, subjects get default case. In English, the default case is Acc, but in some languages, like German/Dutch, the default case is Nom. | ||
15 | Even though the children were very young, they were able to pass the control items, hence the performance was not affected by their cognitive stage. | ||
16 | An anonymous reviewer worries that the statement that children acquiring RNSLs know their target grammar is too strong, due to the fact that the evidence comes from production, and production is sensitive to a number of factor, such as discourse context. I agree that a comprehension study would yield more compelling data, however the fact that children acquiring RNSLs produce a higher rate of null subjects than children acquiring English already suggests that the grammar of the two groups differs. | ||
17 | Some languages classified as PNSLs license null subjects in contexts quite different from the ones described here. For example, in Shipibo third-person pronouns are optionally null, whereas second and first-person subjects are obligatory overt Camacho (2013). We can question whether PNSL is an adequate classification for these languages, or if the variation could be regarded as a microparameter (in the terms of Roberts (2019)). | ||
18 | An anonymous reviewer raised an important point: Figure 3 aggregates children’s production of null subjects across several months. In their words, maybe the aggregation disguises a parameter missetting. If we looked at narrow time frames, we might find evidence of missetting at certain points in time. I think the reviewer is correct in their observation. All we can say is that for a certain age group, there was no evidence of parameter missetting. | ||
19 | According to Simões, two other factors contributed to the number of null subjects found in André’s speech: what the author calls “ritualized repetitions” and André’s frequent use of the statement “I don’t know” (não sei) which is usually uttered with a null subject in BP even in the speech of adults. Adults, differently than children, are unlikely to constantly respond to a question with “I don’t know”. | ||
20 | Generic null subjects are also attested in RNSLs, such as Chinese and Thai, since RNLs lack -features. If we consider only this fact, without taking into account the knowledge BP-speaking children have about agreement, it is not possible to say, by this experiment, whether BP-speaking children know they are acquiring a PNSL: they could have a grammar of an RNSL. As illustrated in the sentence below, the subject in the impersonal sentence below in Mandarin only has the generic interpretation:
However, BP-speaking children exhibit stable knowledge of agreement at least by the age of 3;00 Magalhães (2006). Agreement is not present in RNSLs, but it is in PNSLs. The known facts about the acquisition of agreement in BP in conjunction with children’s interpretation of null subjects can reveal whether BP-speaking children are aware they are acquiring a PNSL. | ||
21 | Brigadeiro is a popular Brazilian dessert. | ||
22 | For the statistics and graph creation, the R R Core Team (2021) package gstatsplot Patil (2021) was used. In the x-axis, n = 60 refers to the number of sentences judged by each age group. Each age group was composed by 10 children. G4 = 4-year-olds, G5 = 5-year-olds, G6 = 6-year-olds, G7 = 7-year-olds. | ||
23 | A reviewer mentioned that hypothesis (i) directly conflicts with the proposal that children are grammatically conservative Snyder (2002, 2007, 2011). In principle, it would be possible to assume that children are conservative when acquiring syntactic aspects of their language, while assuming that the same does not hold in acquiring pragmatics. However, this assumption needs to be further investigated. |
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Types | Consistent | Partial | Semi | Non-Null-Subject |
---|---|---|---|---|
Examples | Italian, Greek | BP, Finnish | Kriyol, German | English, French |
Main (3SG) | null | overt | overt | overt |
Embedded (3SG) | null | null | overt | overt |
Generic | overt | null | overt | overt |
Expletive | null | null | null | overt |
Radical pro-drop | Consistent null-subject | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
Chinese | Italian | EP | Spanish | |
tánlùn | parlare | falar | hablar | |
1SG | tánlùn | parlo | falo | hablo |
2SG | tánlùn | parli | falas | habla |
3SG | tánlùn | parla | fala | hablas |
1PL | tánlùn | parliamo | falamos | hablamos |
2PL | tánlùn | parlate | falam 1 | habláis |
3PL | tánlùn | parlano | falam | hablan |
Partial null-subject | ||
---|---|---|
Brazilian Portuguese | Finnish | |
falar | puhua | |
1SG | falo | puhun |
2SG | fala | puhut |
3SG | fala | puhuu |
1PL | fala | puhutaan |
2PL | falam | puhutte |
3PL | falam | puhuu |
Non-null-subject | Semi-null-subject | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
English | French) | Icelandic (4 distinctions) | Kriyol | |
talk | parler 1 | tala | fala | |
1SG | talk | paKl | tala | fala |
2SG | talk | paKl | talar | fala |
3SG | talks | paKl | talar | fala |
1PL | talk | paKlÕ | tölum | fala |
2PL | talk | parle | talið | fala |
3PL | talk | paKl | tala | fala |
Average MLU | Overt Subjects |
---|---|
1.77 | 27% |
2.49 | 52% |
3.39 | 70% |
4.22 | 79% |
Child | Null Subjects |
---|---|
Diana | 73% |
Martina | 67% |
Raffaello | 79% |
Rosa | 77% |
Children | 75% |
Adults | 74% |
Age Group | N = Participants | Percentage |
---|---|---|
G1 | 14 | 90.7% |
G2 | 18 | 73.5% |
G3 | 25 | 75.5% |
Children | 57 | 78.5% |
Adults | 9 | 63.7% |
Child | Generic Null Subjects | Age of Emergence |
---|---|---|
Maria Eliza | 34 | 3;4 |
Túlio | 42 | 1;9 |
Elias | 1 | 2;7 |
Nino | 9 | 1;8 |
Gustavo | 0 | after 2;10 |
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Bertolino, K. The Setting of the Null Subject Parameters across (Non-)Null-Subject Languages. Languages 2024, 9, 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9080276
Bertolino K. The Setting of the Null Subject Parameters across (Non-)Null-Subject Languages. Languages. 2024; 9(8):276. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9080276
Chicago/Turabian StyleBertolino, Karina. 2024. "The Setting of the Null Subject Parameters across (Non-)Null-Subject Languages" Languages 9, no. 8: 276. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9080276