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

Abstract

The choice between a pronoun and zero anaphor for the expression of third-person subjects is examined in a corpus of Vera'a (Oceanic). While predominantly expressed by a pronoun, subjects are found to permit zero form with referents that have low anaphoric distance. Within this context, zero is found to be preferred with a subset of verbal predicates that take a specific tense-aspect-mood-polarity (TAMP) marker that historically retains subject agreement. The strong preference for pronouns is related to the clitic behavior of adjacent TAMP morphology and the rudimentarity of agreement. Animacy and number also bear on subject variation. Effects of clause-combining and the use of connectives do not align with findings from studies of the same choice in other languages. Our findings underscore the prominent role of purely structural over functional motivations for the choice of pronouns over zero.

Lexical anaphora : a corpus-based typological study of referential choice

“…Most zero subjects in Vera'a occur in clause-chaining contexts (i.e. where the antecedent was the subject of the immediately preceding clause ;Schnell 2011;Schnell & Barth 2020), not unlike English (cf. also Schnell & Barth 2018).…”

“…At the same time, this is where zero subjects in particular are an extremely frequent occurrence (crosscorpus mean P = 0.71, σ = 0.212 in chains vs. P = 0.43, σ = 0.203 outside), including in English (P = 0.28 vs. P = 0.06) and Vera'a (P = 0.51 vs. P = 0.18), where it is in fact the context in which the majority of zero subjects occur (cf. Huddleston & Pullum 2002;Schnell & Barth 2020).…”

“…Numerous studies have observed the special role of same-clause chains across languages, noting further that this is also the context in which zero expression is the most common, even in languages that usually exhibit a marked dispreference for zero, such as English (e.g. Owens et al 2013: 263 Schnell & Barth 2020 for Vera'a; and many more). Shifts to a different referent conversely tend to favour more informative forms.…”