Expletive Pronoun Deletion Elicitation
Date
2020-11-19
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Abstract
Under the current minimalist program, most spoken English sentences are required to have an overt subject by virtue of the strong EPP feature at T. In informal spoken English however, it is possible to omit an expletive or referential pronoun before the raising verb seems. In sentences with a referential pronoun subject, participants will take notice of referential pronoun constructions and assign stress to the subject pronoun, even if it is absent in what they are reading aloud (Weir, 2019). When listening to degraded audio, interspeaker phonological variation plays a significant role in determining the likelihood of reproducing a sentence with the subject pronoun absent. Previous research on the topic of subject pronoun deletion in spoken English has been approached from both a pragmatic approach (Mack et al. 2012) and a phonological approach. The results of the present study suggest a combination of these two approaches which explains the interspeaker variation in the audio recreation data of the present study. This paper also argues that the phonetic patterns that appeared in Weir (2019) are the result of participants adjusting based on the syntactic differences in sentences based on the referentiality of the pronoun subject.
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Linguistics, syntax, phonology, pronoun deletion