Another non-null subject language: Variable subject expression in German
Despite the fact that Standard German is typologically classified as a non-null-subject language, variation in subject expression (SE) in German is well documented historically and in modern varieties. Following previous variationist accounts of other languages (e.g., Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019; Leroux & Jarmasz 2006), our study offers a new approach to SE in colloquial, spoken Standard German by using naturalistic speech data.
A corpus of 89,209 words produced by 32 native speakers of German yielded 194 tokens of finite declarative clauses containing unexpressed subjects with a specific human referent, which we compared to a principled sample of 309 tokens with overt pronominal subjects produced by the same speakers.
Using stepwise logistic regression analysis, we found that three factors were significant predictors of SE: presence of preverbal material, grammatical person/number, and verb class. Our results show that German patterns with Spanish, English, and French regarding the constraints on SE.
