On the role of information structure in the licensing of null subjects in Old High German: an analysis of null subjects in inti coordinated clauses in the Old High German Diatessaron.

Recent work on the syntax of Old High German (Axel 2005, 2007, Axel/Weiß 2012, Weiß/Volodina 2018, Schlachter 2012, Cognola/Walkden 2019a,b) has demonstrated that this language phase was characterised, unlike present-day German, from the presence of an asymmetric pro-drop system, i.e. OHG was a null-subject language, in which null subjects typically appeared in main but not in embedded clauses. The distribution of null subjects in OHG is captured either through a syntactic account (a null subject is licensed via V-to-C movement and thus blocked when the finite verb cannot move to CP as in embedded clauses, see also Axel 2007, Axel/Weiß 2012, Weiß/Volodina 2018) or through a discourse/pragmatic account, according to which the null subject is licensed via a matching relation between a null referential pronoun pro and a null Topic in CP (Schlachter 2012, Cognola/Walkden 2019a,b). In the latter account the licensing of the null subject is shown to be blocked in non-root embedded clauses with a reduced left periphery. By relying on novel data from the OHG translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron I will provide further evidence for the matching-topic analysis by considering the distribution of null subjects in inti coordinated clauses, which are generally analysed as cases of Topic-drop of the same type of present-day German (Weiß/Volodina 2018, Cognola/Walkden 2019a). I will show that the topic-drop analysis is untenable for this main clause type and I will propose an alternative account according to which null subjects are licensed through a matching-topic mechanism. I will also show that the proposed analysis allows to easily account for V1 main clauses with free-inversion (Inversion nach inti sentences, Coniglio/Schlachter 2013) which I will show involve the presence of an overt/silent expletive tho in the FP hosting the silent Topic and can receive the same analysis as free-inversion sentences in Romance (Sheehan 2010).

This paper focuses on the distribution of null subjects in inti coordinated clauses in the Old High German translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron and shows that the presence of null referential subjects in this construction should not be analysed as a case of Topic drop of the same type of present-day German, but as a case of pure pro-drop of Romance type, involving the presence of a silent category pro licensed via a matching relation with a null Topic in CP (cf. Frascarelli 2007, 2018). The analysis will be shown to be able to also account for the presence of V1 main clauses with free-inversion (Inversion nach inti sentences, cf. Coniglio & Schlachter 2013) and to offer a novel scenario on the loss of both the Inversion nach inti construction and pro-drop in the history of German