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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2019

Alexandra Simonenko ,
Benoit Crabbé  and
Sophie Prévost
Alexandra Simonenko
Affiliation:
FWO/UGhent
Benoit Crabbé
Affiliation:
LLF, CNRS/Paris Diderot, USPC
Sophie Prévost
Affiliation:
Lattice, CNRS/ENS/Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/Université PSL/USPC*
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , October 2019 , pp. 275 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

*

Sophie Prévost's affiliation has been corrected and funding sources have been added to the acknowledgments. An addendum detailing this change has also been published (doi:10.1017/S0954394519000267).

This work has been supported by the Labex EFL and Research Foundation Flanders. The authors are very thankful to three anonymous reviewers of Language Variation and Change for extremely helpful comments. We would like to express our deep gratitude to Yves Charles Morin, Henri Kauhanen, George Walkden, Paul Hirschbühler, Philippe Schlenker, and Hedde Zeijlstra for discussions and suggestions. The project has benefited from the feedback from the audiences at WCCFL 34, DiGS 2016, XLanS: Triggers of language change in the Language Sciences, workshop Linguistic Knowledge & Patterns of Variation, Texts, Tools, and workshop Methods in Digital Classics and Medieval Studies, seminars at Institut Jean Nicod, Université Diderot Paris 7, and the University of Manchester. The first author acknowledges the support of the Research Foundation Flanders. The work of the third author has been supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program “Investissements d'Avenir” (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083). It contributes to the IdEx Université de Paris - ANR-18-IDEX-0001.

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