Pro-drop in interrogative clauses across older Germanic and Romance languages

This chapter investigates the mechanisms of null subject licensing in direct interrogatives, an environment which is generally neglected in investigation into null subjects, using data from a range of early Romance and Germanic languages considered to be asymmetric pro-drop languages, i.e. languages in which null subjects are favored in main clauses. We find that there is subtle variation between the languages in question, but that two factors in particular – interrogative type and person – are crucial in conditioning this variation, and we sketch analyses based on the differential availability of Agree relations with left-peripheral elements. Therefore, null subjects in main interrogative clauses are licensed in two slightly different manners in the two language families – a fact which we show follows from differences in the structure of their left periphery and in agreement morphology.

It has long been established that the older Romance languages are null subject languages. More recently, a flurry of work has shown that this is true for all the older Germanic languages too, albeit to different extents. What is not agreed on is the precise analysis of null subjects in these varieties: a range of proposals exist (see the contributions in Cognola & Casalicchio 2018a for some contenders). In this chapter we address this problem through the lens of questions (direct interrogatives). This under-investigated clause type has the potential to tease apart the subtle differences in predictions made by the main analyses of null subjects on the market. We do so by means of a quantitative and qualitative corpus-based investi- gation of texts from several older Germanic and Romance languages. We find that there is subtle variation between the languages in question, but that two factors in particular—interrogative type and person—are crucial in conditioning this variation, and we sketch analyses based on the differential availability of Agree relations with left-peripheral elements (following Frascarelli 2007, 2018 and Sigurðsson 2011). The chapter is structured as follows. §5.2 sets out the theoretical background and the motivation for the present study. §5.3 discusses our methodology and approach in general terms. §5.4 presents the texts studied and our findings for the individual languages. Reaching an adequate analysis is the aim of §5.5, and §5.6 concludes.