This thesis offers a pragmatic analysis of subjectless sentences in non-null subject
languages, focusing on English ‘diary drop’ (as in ‘Saw a good film yesterday’). In
chapter 1, I survey the data and discuss existing syntactic analyses (Haegeman & Ihsane
1999, 2001). While these generally acknowledge the importance of pragmatic factors in
an overall account, no detailed investigation of their contribution has been proposed.
In chapter 2, I consider subjectless sentences in child language, and suggest that
relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986/95) can shed light on why such utterances
occur. In chapter 3, I revisit the adult data, and having established that null subjects
function as referring expressions, I consider two pragmatically-oriented approaches to
the analysis of referring expressions: Accessibility Theory (Ariel, 1990) and the
Givenness Hierarchy (Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski, 1993). Both adopt the relevance-theoretic
framework, but claim that relevance alone is insufficient to account for the
data.
In chapters 4 and 5, I develop a relevance-based account of referring expressions,
and argue that we can do without the machinery of Accessibility Theory and the
Givenness Hierarchy on two assumptions: first, that referring expressions encode
procedural as well as conceptual meaning (Blakemore 1987, 2002), and second, that this
procedural meaning does not identify the intended referent by appeal to considerations
of Accessibility or Givenness. An important implication of my account is that the
choice of referring expression not only affects reference resolution but can also
contribute to what is implicitly communicated by an utterance. I provide detailed
evidence for this.
In chapter 6, I return to the original null subject data and show that my relevance-based
approach sheds new light on how these utterances function in a non-null subject
language. In Chapter 7, I draw general conclusions and revisit the conceptual-procedural
distinction in light of the analyses proposed