Null and overt subject biases in Spanish and Italian: a cross-linguistic comparison

Over the last twenty years a great deal of linguistic research has investigated how anaphoric expressions retrieve their antecedents in the discourse showing that a variety of pragmatic factors together with grammatical and cognitive constraints contribute in determining the distribution of different types of expressions. A particularly interesting case for the study of such phenomena is that of Null Subjec

Anaphoric Preferences of Null and Overt Subjects in Italian and Spanish: a Cross-linguistic Comparison

This thesis focuses on the cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish regarding the pragmatic restrictions on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns (NS and OSP). It also tries to identify possible links between such cross-linguistic differences and morpho-syntactic differences at the level of the verbal morphology of the two languages. Spanish and Italian are typologically related and morpho-syntactically similar and have been assumed to instantiate the same setting of the NS parameter with respect to not only its syntactic licensing conditions, but also the pragmatic constraints determining the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns, and this assumption has had important implications for cross-linguistic research. The first aim of this study was to test directly for the first time the assumption about the equivalence of Italian and Spanish; in order to do so, I run a series of self-paced reading experiments using the same materials translated in each language, so that the results were directly comparable. The experiments were based on Carminati’s (2002) study on antecedent preferences for Italian NSs and OSPs in intra-sentential anaphora, testing the Position of Antecedent Strategy. The results suggest that while in Italian there is a strict division of labour between NS and OSP (confirming Carminati’s findings), this division is not as clear-cut in Spanish. More precisely, while Italian personal pronouns unambiguously signal a switch in subject reference, the association between OSPs and switch reference seems to be much weaker in Spanish. These results, which are interpreted in terms of Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) cross-linguistic typology of deficient pronouns, highlight an asymmetry between the strength of NS and OSP biases in Spanish that could not have emerged through the traditional methodology used by the numerous variationist studies on the subject, based on corpus analysis. A subsequent pair of experiments tested the hypothesis that the cross-linguistic differences attested might be related to the relative syncretism of the Spanish verbal morphology compared to the Italian one with regard to the unambiguous expression of person features on the verbal head. The results only provided weak support for the hypothesis, although they did confirm the presence of the cross- linguistic differences in the processing and resolution of anaphoric NS and OSP dependencies revealed by the previous experiments

Anaphora Resolution in Near-Native Speakers of Italian

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and have reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language. The two groups of speakers were presented with complex sentences consist-ing of a main clause and a subordinate clause, in which the subor-dinate clause had either an overt pronoun or a null subject pronoun. In half of the sentences the main clause preceded the subordinate clause (forward anaphora) and in the other half the subordinate clause preceded the main clause (backward anaphora). Participants performed in a picture verification task in which they had to indi-cate the picture(s) that corresponded to the meaning of the subor-dinate clause, thus identifying the possible antecedents of the null or overt subject pronouns. The patterns of responses of the two groups were very similar with respect to the null subject pronouns in both the forward and backward anaphora conditions. Compared to native monolingual speakers, however, the near-natives had a significantly higher preference for the subject of the matrix clause as a possible antecedent of overt subject pronouns, particularly in the backward anaphora condition. The results indicate that near-native speakers have acquired the syntactic constraints on pronom-inal subjects in Italian, but may have residual indeterminacy in the interface processing strategies they employ in interpreting pronom-inal forms

Anaphoric preferences of null and overt subjects in Italian and Spanish : a cross-linguistic comparison

This thesis focuses on the cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish regarding the pragmatic restrictions on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns (NS and OSP). It also tries to identify possible links between such cross-linguistic differences and morpho-syntactic differences at the level of the verbal morphology of the two languages. Spanish and Italian are typologically related and morpho-syntactically similar and have been assumed to instantiate the same setting of the NS parameter with respect to not only its syntactic licensing conditions, but also the pragmatic constraints determining the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns, and this assumption has had important implications for cross-linguistic research. The first aim of this study was to test directly for the first time the assumption about the equivalence of Italian and Spanish; in order to do so, I run a series of self-paced reading experiments using the same materials translated in each language, so that the results were directly comparable. The experiments were based on Carminati’s (2002) study on antecedent preferences for Italian NSs and OSPs in intra-sentential anaphora, testing the Position of Antecedent Strategy. The results suggest that while in Italian there is a strict division of labour between NS and OSP (confirming Carminati’s findings), this division is not as clear-cut in Spanish. More precisely, while Italian personal pronouns unambiguously signal a switch in subject reference, the association between OSPs and switch reference seems to be much weaker in Spanish. These results, which are interpreted in terms of Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) cross-linguistic typology of deficient pronouns, highlight an asymmetry between the strength of NS and OSP biases in Spanish that could not have emerged through the traditional methodology used by the numerous variationist studies on the subject, based on corpus analysis. A subsequent pair of experiments tested the hypothesis that the cross-linguistic differences attested might be related to the relative syncretism of the Spanish verbal morphology compared to the Italian one with regard to the unambiguous expression of person features on the verbal head. The results only provided weak support for the hypothesis, although they did confirm the presence of the cross- linguistic differences in the processing and resolution of anaphoric NS and OSP dependencies revealed by the previous experiments.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo