Evaluating synchronic explanations by means of diachrony: on the nature of pro and its history in Russian

26 сентября 2018 года
аудитория 1060
начало в 18:00

 

Nerea Madariaga

Associate professor
Department of Classical Studies (Section of Slavic Philology), University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV)

 

Аннотация

In this talk, I evaluate the possible analyses of null referential subjects (NSs) with the help of diachronic data. The two main hypotheses on the nature of referencial NSs are the following: (A) NSs are true (silent) subject pronouns, deleted at PF (Holmberg 2005); (B) NSs are not subject pronouns, but something else: just rich agreement on the verb or bare null NPs, depending on the language type (Barbosa 2013). I will argue in favour of the first hypothesis based on the change in the pro-drop properties that took place in the history of Russian. In short, the loss of consistent pro-drop in late Middle Russian implied that: (i) NSs in non-embedded contexts became restricted to instances licensed by pragmatics, otherwise, overt weak pronouns had to fill the subject position (Russian became a partial NS-language); (ii) In embedded contexts (in complement position of a main verb), learners lost the possibility of parsing a null element in the embedded subject gap, and started to parse the alternative null category available, traditionally called PRO, and analysed as a trace under the Movement Theory of Control (Hornstein 1999, Boeckx et al 2010). As a consequence of this change, silent embedded subjects (both finite and non-finite) became licensed only by Obligatory Control. The unified way of licensing NSs in embedded contexts, both finite and non-finite, was determined by a diachronic process, which confronted learners with two alternative elements to be parsed in the relevant gap and, therefore, had to imply some lexical or featural content in that subject position. This change is thus compatible with those hypotheses that posit in the subject gap a silent referential element of some kind, which can enter in competition with the other null (PRO or trace), and is incompatible with views like the rich agreement hypothesis, which denies the presence of a null element in the subject position and, crucially, does not allow for a unified analysis of finite and non-finite NSs in this language.

 

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