Romanian subject alternation: the position of antecedent hypothesis
Abstract
Position of Antecedent Hypothesis (Carminati 2002, 2005) is one of the main factors accounting for preferences in languages with null / pronominal subject alternation. According to this hypothesis, null subjects favor a subject antecedent and pronominal subjects, a non-subject antecedent. We ran a first experiment in which we found that null subjects are prefered over pronominal ones in Romanian. Additionally, negative polarity slightly increased the number of pronominal subjects. Our second experiment revealed that preferences for a subject or an object antecedent for null vs pronominal subject are less categorical than in Italian, and this tendency might be linked to a less widespread use of null subjects in Romanian, compared to Italian.
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