Clitics are not enough: on agreement and null subjects in Brazilian Venetan

Abstract

This paper presents some facts about the syntax of subject pronouns in contact. We investigate agreement and EPP-checking in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety spoken in southern Brazil in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. Central Venetan, the northern Italo-Romance variety that constitutes the basis of Brazilian Venetan, is a null-subject language presenting agreement-like subject clitics; Brazilian Portuguese is a partial pro-drop language, in which null subjects are allowed only in precise syntactic conditions and it is developing reduced pronominal subjects. We will address two changes we detected in Brazilian Venetan with respect to the syntax of subject pronouns: the non-contrastive realisation of the first person singular tonic pronoun, and the change in the syntax of subject clitics, which seem to be used as weak pronouns rather than agreement items. We will claim that the first change has to be connected to the simplification of interface conditions between syntax and discourse, a pattern which is commonly attested in bilingual speakers, while the second can be quite safely ascribed to the contact with a partially overlapping structure, namely the reduced pronominal subjects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. We analyse the two phenomena, trying to find possible links between them in order to develop an analysis of subject clitics in contact and the conditions in which we may most probably find an effect of contact.

The syntax of subject pronouns in heritage languages

“…shown by the results from the spontaneous production task in the present study, the drop of subject clitics in heritage Venetan is strictly dependent on requirements of the syntax-discourse interface. This behaviour hence supports both the idea that they indeed display pronominal properties, as shown in Frasson (2021) for Brazilian…”

“…As already noticed in Frasson (2021), however, the opposite order with respect to negation is also found in Brazilian Venetan. Consider example ( 29 -that subject clitics behave as pronouns in the context of topic shift;…”

“…The fact that null pronominal subjects have a more limited distribution in heritage northern varieties was already noticed in Frasson (2021) with particular reference to first person pronouns in Brazilian Venetan; the change was analysed as the result of a process of attrition or incomplete acquisition in contact with Brazilian…”

“…(14) Italian Venetan (Frasson, 2021) No (20) shows that, in a contrastive environment, a strong pronoun appears. As predicted by Cardinaletti and Starke (1999), a reduced form cannot be realised in dislocation.…”

“…Participants had to choose between two proposed sentences, one with a subject clitic and one without it. Five items were used to test the hypothesis already presented in Frasson (2021) and Frasson et al (2021) that subject clitics in heritage varieties allow for a pronominal interpretation, a fact that results in the possible drop of the subject clitics even in contexts in which they would be obligatory in the same varieties as spoken in Italy.…”