Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative

Abstract

As a so-called non-null subject language, it has been proposed that in English, unexpressed subjects occur only in registers that have specific grammatical properties. We test this hypothesis through a comparison of the conditioning of subject expression for third-person singular human specific subjects in English conversation and narrative. Despite a stark difference in the rates of nonexpression (4% in conversation vs. 22% in narratives), there is no evidence of different grammars across the registers—in both, outside of coreferential clauses conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects only occur in prosodic initial position in main clause declaratives. Within the variable context, in both registers, expression is sensitive to accessibility, priming, and temporal sequentiality. A register effect is, however, evident in the contextual distribution, with a larger proportion of the narrative tokens occurring in contexts propitious to unexpressed subjects, and it is this that accounts for the higher rate of nonexpression in this register.

Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech

“…In all varieties of Spanish, pronominal subjects exist as an option alongside unexpressed (or null) subjects in most contexts, unlike in English where variation in subject expression is much more limited (Travis & Lindstrom, 2014; Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2015, pp. 89–90).…”

Variable grammars are variable across registers: future temporal reference in English

“…On the one hand, Tagliamonte (2016) reports that internal constrains conditioning the FTR alternation are fairly invariant in a corpus of e-mails, web instant messaging, and text messages. Travis and Lindstrom (2016) arrive at a similar conclusion, investigating subject expression (third-person subject versus ∅) in dialogic conversations and monologic narratives. On the other hand, Grafmiller (2014), for the genitive alternation in English ( the speech of the president versus the president's speech ) across six spoken and written registers, uncovers substantial interactions between external, stylistic constraints and the probabilistic weights of language-internal constraints.…”

Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero

“…Variationist work has focused on specific factors applicable mostly to individual languages (e.g., Cameron & Flores-Ferrain, 2004; Meyerhoff, 2000, 2009; Travis & Lindstrom, 2016). More recently, Torres Cacoullos and Travis (2019) have proposed a way to overcome the gap between variationist studies of language-internal variation and cross-language comparison.…”