Agenda

Federica Cognola

On the licensing of null subjects across main clauses in Old High German and Old Italian (joint work with George Walkden)

While there has been a substantial body of research on the asymmetry between main and subordinate clauses in terms of the licensing of pro-drop, potential differences between types of unembedded clause have received much less attention – despite the fact that competing theories of pro-drop make strong, clear predictions about the distribution of null subjects across clause types, especially with regard to interrogatives. This paper presents the first in-depth comparative study of pro-drop in both declaratives and interrogatives in two asymmetric pro-drop languages: Old High German and Old Italian. Based on a parallel corpus study using two translations of Tatian’s Diatessaron, we show that there is a clear difference in distribution between interrogatives and declaratives: null subjects are more frequent in declarative clauses than in interrogatives, and these also differ in terms of the persons in which pro-drop is licensed. Our results speak against the V-in-C licensing theory of asymmetric pro-drop (Benincà 1984, Adams 1987 and Axel 2007), and in favour of an account based on an Agree relation with left-peripheral operators in the sense of Frascarelli (2007, 2018).

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For some reason, even if the event is set as public, some user need to be accepted manually. This may take some time if the audience is numerous (as I hope). The room will open at 13:45 to accept participants until 14:14. The talk will start at 14:15 sharp.

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bio: Federica Cognola is a Senior Lecturer in German Linguistics at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. Her research interests include verb second, OV/VO word orders, overt and null referential and expletive subjects, scrambling, contact linguistics, monolingual and bilingual language acquisition, language variation and change, and diachronic syntax