Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

French

Supervisor

Heap, David

2nd Supervisor

Nagy, Naomi

Affiliation

University of Toronto

Co-Supervisor

Abstract

In languages like Italian and Spanish, verbal inflection is often able to disambiguate the subject for person and number. These languages also permit a null subject pronoun (pro-drop). In other Romance languages, such as French, verbal paradigms are much more syncretic, and overt subject pronouns are required in most instances.

The functional hypothesis proposes a causal relationship between these two aspects of a language: if a verb’s inflection disambiguates, an overt subject can be redundant.

In this dissertation, I investigate pro-drop in Ciociaro—a sibling language of Italian, which is spoken in Frosinone, Italy. Ciociaro’s verbal inflections are highly syncretic compared to Italian. I compare Ciociaro to the regional Italian spoken in Calabria, which has a more distinctive verbal paradigm.

In comparing the significant factors that constrain pro-drop in these two languages, if the functional hypothesis is supported, Ciociaro should employ overt subject pronouns more than Calabrian Italian to compensate for its more ambiguous verb phrases.

I use three datasets in this dissertation: a heritage corpus of interviews I recorded with the Ciociaro community of Sarnia, Ontario (CHILS Corpus); a homeland Ciociaro corpus drawn from a linguistic atlas containing elicitations (AIS; Jaberg & Jud, 1928); and a Calabrian Italian corpus of recorded interviews, both the heritage community in Toronto and the homeland variety spoken in Calabria (HLVC Corpus; Nagy, 2011). From these corpora I extract 100 tokens from each speaker, which are then coded for linguistic and extralinguistic variables that are significant in comparable pro-drop analyses. Multivariate analyses are then conducted using Rbrul (Johnson, 2009) to support comparisons of the factors’ effects in each corpus.

The CHILS corpus comprises 1,736 tokens from 20 speakers, with a 72% null subject rate. The significant variables are: the phrase’s subject (subject), priming from the previous realization, and verb tense.

From the AIS there are 583 tokens from six participants, with a 76% null rate. The significant variables are: priming from the elicitation prompts, subject, and ambiguous, meaning the verbal inflection is ambiguous for subject.

The HLVC corpus contains 1,634 tokens from 20 speakers, with an 80% null rate. The significant variables are: priming from the previous referent, subject, and preverbal elements.

In a combined analysis of all three corpora, subject and corpus are the significant variables, with CHILS disfavouring and HLVC favouring null subjects. This supports the functional hypothesis as Ciociaro has a higher rate of ambiguous verbal inflections. The significance of subject is consistent with other pro-drop research suggesting a pan-Romance effect.

The combined analysis also reveals that ambiguous is not a significant variable. Yet, 34% of the CHILS tokens have an ambiguous subject, while it is only 7% for the HLVC corpus. While ambiguous phrases are inversely correlated with null subject rates across the datasets, they are not significantly causally linked. Thus, the functional hypothesis is not supported in this respect.

This dissertation advances our understanding of pro-drop in Romance languages, representing the first variationist analysis of pro-drop in an Italo-Romance dialetto.

Summary for Lay Audience

Subject pronouns in English disambiguate ‘I speak’ from ‘we speak’ or ‘they speak’. An exception to these identical forms of the verb is ‘speaks’, which has either ‘he’ or ‘she’ as its subject. Generally, English requires a subject pronoun be used. In languages like Italian, however, subject pronouns can be omitted (e.g., parlo ‘(I) speak’), which is known as pro-drop.

Italian verbs often carry distinct information: io parlo (‘I speak’), loro parlano (‘you speak’), and lui/lei parla (‘he/she speaks’). Each of these is pronounced differently enough in Italian that the subject, in many cases, can be understood without a subject pronoun.

The functional hypothesis proposes that the function of subject pronouns is to disambiguate the subject of a phrase. If a verb is clearly inflected for subject, then a subject pronoun is redundant.

I investigate this hypothesis by comparing pro-drop in Calabrian Italian and Ciociaro—a language related to Italian. While Calabrian Italian verbs are often distinct for different subjects, in Ciociaro many verbs have identical forms for multiple subjects, similar to ‘speak’ in English. According to the functional hypothesis, Ciociaro should require subject pronouns more because its verbs are more ambiguous. I also compare two varieties of each language: the homeland variety in Italy and heritage variety in Canada. By comparing these varieties, I investigate whether subject pronouns are used more in an English-dominant environment.

For the homeland Ciociaro data, I use a linguistic atlas compiled by asking participants to translate phrases from Italian into Ciociaro (Jaberg & Jud, 1928). The heritage Ciociaro data is from interviews I recorded in Sarnia, Ontario (the CHILS). I compare Ciociaro to Nagy’s homeland and heritage recordings of Calabrian Italian (the HLVC; Nagy, 2011, 2024), conducted in Italy and Toronto, Ontario. I extract 100 phrases from each participant: six AIS, 20 CHILS, and 20 HLVC (10 heritage and 10 homeland).

I analyse these phrases for 17 factors that may influence subject pronoun usage. Some of the variables include: the subject itself, we could expect fewer 3rd person subject singular pronouns in English because ‘speaks’ is less ambiguous that ‘speak’; the preceding sentence’s subject, we’d expect fewer subject pronouns for phrases like ‘I listen, I speak’ than ‘I listen, you speak’; and ambiguity, more subject pronouns are used if a verb is ambiguous. It is important to note though, that the specific findings differ from one Romance language to the next (e.g., an ambiguous subject in Spanish might be different in Italian).

From my analysis, homeland and heritage Calabrian speakers use subject pronouns nearly identically, suggesting English has had no effect. I find that subject pronouns are used more often by Sarnia’s Ciociaro speakers (28%) than Calabrian Italian speakers (20%), but ambiguity is not a significant predictive factor of subject pronoun use. Ambiguity is a significant factor for the AIS data, suggesting CHILS speakers can use context to understand the subject, which is not available to AIS participants who are translating disconnected phrases.

This dissertation contributes to our understanding of pro-drop in Romance languages, including the role of the functional hypothesis, and the importance of studying under-investigated languages.

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
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