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This paper discusses a pattern in which a finite verb is preceded by a locative PP which combines with an initial or final occurrence of the adverb dan (‘then’) and which may look like a violation of the V2 constraint. The paper is relevant in the context of how to handle what look like exceptions to the V2 pattern, a point that is sometimes neglected in the formal literature, though Zwart (2008a) draws attention to the importance of also capturing such recalcitrant data. Based on standard arguments for constituency, it will be shown that the adverb, which has a non-temporal reading, and the associated PP form one constituent. Thus, a pattern that might at first appear to be a violation of V2 in fact is shown to be in line with the constraint. published

The empirical focus of this paper is what looks like a verb third (V3) pattern in West Flemish (WF) in which an adverbial modifier (typically a temporal or conditional adjunct) is followed by a non-inverted subject-initial verb second (V2) root clause. This pattern will be referred to as the non-inverted V3 pattern. This paper has two goals. The first and major aim is to document the WF non-inverted V3 pattern, detailing both its syntactic and its semantic properties, in order to make these data available to the research community at large. We also develop an analysis in line with the hypothesis, substantiated in the paper, that WF is a genuine V2 language and that the apparent V3 data in do not jeopardise this assumption. The core hypothesis is that the initial adjunct in V3 patterns is extra-sentential or ‘main clause-external’ (cf. Broekhuis and Corver in Syntax of Dutch. Verbs and verb phrases. Volume 3: Chapter 14: main clause-external elements, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2016. http://www.oapen.org/ ), and that it combines with a full-fledged V2 clause by virtue of a discourse-structure (cf. Auer in Pragmatics 6:295–322, 1996). That the non-inverted V3 pattern is not acceptable in all varieties of Dutch is accounted for in terms of microvariation in the syntactic derivation of subject-initial V2 sentences.

This paper speculates that the merge site of an adverbial clause, i.e. its external syntax, is determined by its derivational history, i.e. its internal syntax. Starting from the distinction between central adverbial clauses and peripheral adverbial clauses, it is first shown that the degree of integration of an adverbial clause correlates with its internal syntax, i.e. the availability of left peripheral functional material. The correlation can be informally stated as follows “the more structure is manifested in the adverbial clause, the higher it is merged”. This paper develops a derivational account for this correlation. The proposal adopts the movement derivation of adverbial clauses, according to which, like relative clauses, adverbial clauses are derived by movement of a specialized IP-related operator (aspectual, temporal, modal, etc) to the left periphery. The paper explores observations drawn from the traditional literature on Japanese grammar (Minami 1974; Noda 1989; 2002) to the effect that the amount of TP-internal functional structure in an adverbial clause also correlates with the presence of specialized functional particles in the matrix clause with which the clause merges. Specifically, we explore Japanese data discussed in Endo (2011; 2012). It is proposed that the merger of an adverbial clause with the associated main clause is determined by the label of the adverbial clause, itself the result of the movement derivation.

Cruschina (2009, 2011) argues against the general claim (cf. Rizzi 1997) that focus fronting is possible only when associated with contrast and proposes, based on data from Sicilian and Sardinian, that corrective focus (CFoc) fronting and mirative focus (MFoc) fronting target distinct left periphery projections. One of the goals of this paper will be to provide independent evidence for this claim drawn from French, a language which we will show only allows MFoc fronting. A second goal will be to provide a much-needed semantic characterization of MFoc. We will show that while MFoc fronting constructions and wh-exclamatives pattern alike in terms of information structure, the former differ semantically from the latter in having what Nouwen and Chernilovskaya (2015) call an e-level rather than an i-level expressive content.

This chapter compares the temporal interpretation of the initial adjuncts in a regular V2 pattern, in which the finite verb has inverted with the subject, and in the West Flemish V3 patterns in which an adjunct precedes a non-inverted V2 pattern. In the periphrastic tenses, a difference in interpretation emerges. In the regular V2 pattern, an initial time adjunct modifies either Reference Time or Event Time of the associated clause. In the non-inverted V3 pattern, the initial temporal clause can only modify matrix Reference Time. This restriction is shown to follow from the analysis elaborated in Haegeman and Greco (2018a,b) combined with a split Tense proposal in which Reference time and Event time are located on distinct functional heads.

In this paper, we test the Cumulative Effect proposed by (Haegeman et al. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation. The Linguistic Review 31(1). 73-150). In particular, we focus on the role of factors of external syntax in the modulation of subject opacity to extraction, addressing different constraints presented in (Haegeman et al. 2014. Deconstructing the subject condition in terms of cumulative constraint violation. The Linguistic Review 31(1). 73-150). Two sets of formal acceptability judgments are presented. In the first experiment, we address the opacity of subjects from a broad point of view, in order to assess whether subject DPs are more resistant to extraction than other DPs. The results confirm that subject constituents are more opaque to extraction than object constituents. In the second experiment, we address the impact on the modulation of the Cumulative Effect of three different constraints individually: The Freezing Principle, the Inactivity Condition and the Edge Condition. We did that through the manipulation of two different factors: The position of the extraction site and the predicate type. The results do not confirm the predictions made by the Cumulative Effect, since the interaction between different factors does not appear to be additive and incremental. We discuss the implications of these results for the existing theories of subject islands and address an alternative perspective, recently proposed by (Bianchi, Valentina & Cristiano Chesi. 2014. Subject islands, reconstruction, and the flow of the computation. Linguistic Inquiry 45(4). 525-569), according to which the opacity of subjects is a function of the syntax semantics interface.

International audience; This paper aims at analysing English structures in which a wh-moved subject triggers agreement both in the clause it is extracted from and in the immediately higher clause. This pattern is only accepted by some native speakers, and it is also attested in corpora. Although the relevant structures could at first sight be analysed as extragrammatical ‘blends’, we propose that they are in fact part of certain speakers’ linguistic competence, and hence generated by the grammar of those speakers. Adopting the approach to subject extraction developed in Rizzi & Shlonsky (2007), we suggest that extracted subjects can exceptionally be ‘hyperactive’ (Carstens 2011), and thus take part in A-relations (case and agreement) in more than one clausal domain.

This paper focuses on the West Flemish discourse markers located at the edge of the clause. After a brief survey of the distribution of discourse markers in WF, the paper proposes a syntactic analysis of the discourse markers ne and we. Based on the distribution of these discourse markers, of vocatives and of dislocated DPs, an articulated speech act layer is elaborated which corroborates the proposals in Hill (2007b). It is postulated that there is a syntactic relation between particles used as discourse markers and vocatives. The paper offers further support for the grammaticalization of pragmatic features at the interface between syntax and discourse and for the hypothesis that the relevant computation at the interface is of the same nature as that in Narrow Syntax.

This special issue features five contributions focussing on the syntax of particles. The aim of this introductory essay is to contextualize the contributions in the linguistic literature and the issues that play a role in it. The status of elements labelled ‘particles’ in the linguistics literature is somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand there seems to be overwhelming cross-paradigmatic consensus with respect to their identification: from functional to formal approaches the term particle is used to label elements such as those boldfaced in (1).

The goal of our paper is to provide a description of an apparent V3 pattern which is salient with some speakers of the Ghent dialect, illustrated in (1), from Vanacker (1980). Vroeger, die bakten wij vier soorten brood formerly die baked we four sorts bread “We used to bake four kinds of bread.” (Gijzenzele 0.28) (Vanacker, 1980, p. 76) In such examples, what would be an initial adverbial constituent in the root clause vroeger, (“formerly”) is separated from the finite verb by what Vanacker (1980) labels a “pleonastic” element, die, in effect leading to a superficial V3 order. At first sight, this element die is optional and it has no impact on the truth conditions of the proposition that it introduces. (2) is also acceptable in the dialect. (2) Vroeger bakten wij vier soorten brood. formerly baked we four sorts bread “We used to bake four kinds of bread.” In the first part of the paper, we will provide a description of the distribution of die. We will also compare its distribution with that of the more widely distributed resumptive adverbs dan (“then”) and daar (“there”), which are typical of the Germanic V2 languages (Salvesen, 2016). Our account will be based both on authentic data drawn from corpora and from anecdotal observations as well as on the results of elicitations with 10 native speakers of the dialect. In the second part of the paper we provide an analysis in terms of Wolfe's (2016) typology of the syntax of V2. Adopting the articulated structure of CP as elaborated in the cartographic framework, we will propose that die is an overt spell out of the head Force and as such a root complementiser.

This chapter discusses the morphosyntax of French, Modern Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian complementizers equivalent to English that. From long-distance wh-extractions across complementizers in these languages, it is shown that (i) the morpheme complementizer is composed of features that are hierarchically ordered according to a functional sequence (fseq) (see Baunaz 2015, 2016a; Baunaz and Lander to appear); (ii) the complementizer morpheme lexicalizes structures of different sizes; (iii) the distribution of complementizers is governed by veridicality (see Baunaz 2015, 2016a); (iv) the complementizer morpheme is syntactically active. The basic template for complementizers that I argue for is F4 > F3 > F2 > F1. Evidence in favor of this template comes from crosslinguistic patterns of syncretism and featural Relativized Minimality (Starke 2001; Rizzi 2004; Haegeman 2010, among others). Evidence in favor of different realizations of the complementizer is provided by means of long-distance extractions across declarative embedded clauses.

This chapter investigates spatial-deictic systems (e.g. English this vs. that, or Latin hīc vs. iste vs. ille) from a wide range of typologically diverse languages. We propose that spatial deixis is encoded as a three-way contrast in Universal Grammar (UG): Proximal ‘close to speaker,’ Medial ‘close to hearer,’ and Distal ‘far from speaker and hearer.’ The empirical core of the chapter focuses on two phenomena: (i) syncretism and (ii) morphological containment. It is shown that only certain kinds of syncretism patterns are attested crosslinguistically: Syncretism cannot target Proximal and Distal without also targeting Medial (a case of *ABA). Furthermore, the cases of morphological containment we have found show that Distal contains Medial, which, in turn, contains Proximal. A functional sequence of three heads is posited that captures our generalizations in a simple and effective way.

This chapter offers a thorough introduction to nanosyntactic theory, a development of the cartographic program in generative grammar. It discusses the foundations on which nanosyntax was conceived, such as the “one feature–one head” maxim and the universal functional sequence (fseq). It also provides a brief comparison of theoretical and terminological issues in nanosyntax vs. the competing framework of Distributed Morphology. It is seen that the syntactic component according to nanosyntax unifies aspects of (what are traditionally called) syntax, morphology, and formal semantics. This is reflected in the tools used to probe linguistic structure in the nanosyntactic approach, such as morphological decomposition, syncretism, and containment. The chapter also discusses the technical details of the syntax–lexicon relation, detailing the matching or spellout process and Starke’s view of spellout-driven movement. This chapter is meant to provide readers with the necessary background to understand and navigate the rest of the chapters in this volume.

Based mainly on a number of interpretive considerations, Henry (1995) and den Dikken (2005) elaborate an analysis of English SCR which mirrors their discourse function. However, while the proposed topic-comment representation may well reflect the information structural properties of SCR, its predictions for the internal and external syntax of SCR are incorrect. In contrast, the predictions would be correct for Germanic V2R, undermining the basis for den Dikken's (2005) assimilation of the two patterns. On the basis of the discussion above I thus conclude that a topic-comment representation for English SCR, though attractive on interpretive grounds, cannot be maintained. The various empirical data discussed in this paper show that a relativization analysis along the lines of that in Doherty (1993, 1994, 2000), reviewed in the light of our current understanding of the articulation of the left periphery (see also Sistrunk, 2012), is to be preferred.

International audience; The focus of this paper is on apparent cases of subject-to-subject raising out of finite clauses in English, which are accepted as (fully) grammatical by a minority of native speakers. The basic pattern involves a bi-clausal structure in which a displaced subject triggers agreement in both the embedded and the matrix clause. Crucially, this ‘double agreement’ pattern is only acceptable when a subject is wh-moved. Our analysis builds on the criterial approach to subject extraction developed in Rizzi (2006) and Rizzi & Shlonsky (2006, 2007). We propose that the main ingredient of the wh-raising pattern is incorporation of a functional head in the embedded left periphery into the matrix V.

The differences between languages with definite determiners and those without definite determiners have been the object of much research. Recently, Boskovic (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010) has uncovered a number of one- and two-way syntactic generalizations which serve to set these two typological groups apart. He accounts for the contrasts observed by proposing that languages with definite determiners (‘DP’ languages) have a DP layer, while determiner-less languages (‘NP’ languages) lack this DP projection altogether. Since the Old Germanic languages did not have fully grammaticalized definite articles, a reasonable hypothesis to explore might be that they were NP languages in Boskovic’s sense. In this paper we explore this hypothesis, focusing mainly on Old Norse; where possible we also discuss Old Norse’s historical predecessors Common Norse and Northwest Germanic (both of which are attested exclusively in runic inscriptions). The specific NP properties considered in this paper are (A) the absence of a fully grammaticalized definite article, (B) syntactic discontinuities and free word order, (C) the absence of double adnominal genitives with transitive deverbal nouns, (D) the absence of clitic doubling and (E) the presence of radical pro drop. The paper’s approach is guided by basic generative assumptions, but its focus is descriptive rather than theoretical.

This paper examines register-based language internal variation, focussing on subject omission in English diaries. This register-specific pattern might be seen as some kind of ‘extragrammatical’ culturally-determined stylistic convention associated with this particular register, but a survey of the relevant data shows that the omission of the subject in diary styles is subject to the core syntactic constraints that have been identified in formal syntax. Importantly, the observed restrictions on subject omission do not follow from a purely functional account according to which recoverable subjects can be omitted: while recoverability certainly plays a role, there are precise constraints on the syntactic positions in which recoverable subjects can be omitted. The empirical generalisation that emerges is that subjects can be omitted in root clauses. Moreover, apart from fronted adjuncts no other constituent can precede the non-overt subject. The generalisation applies both to English and to French. The paper develops an account for subject omission which, in addition to standard assumptions about phrase structure, makes use of (i) the Phase based theory of truncation, (ii) the hypothesis of the articulated subject field. It is shown that other instantiations of subject omission such as that found, for instance, in note style journalese or in Samuel Beckett's poem Rockaby ( Bianchi, 2007 ), are governed by the same principles, suggesting that the pattern is subject to grammatical constraints which are not exclusively tied to the specific register. That the type of subject omission identified here should be analysed in terms of core grammatical principles is confirmed by the fact that subject ellipsis in second conjuncts, a phenomenon which is independent of register variation, is subject to the same restrictions as subject omission in the diary style and can be accounted for using the hypotheses developed here. The conclusion I draw from this discussion is that the grammatical patterns displayed by what might seem a culturally determined linguistic system are fully amenable to core principles and parameters of universal grammar.

A crosslinguistic survey of the expression of polarity emphasis reveals that some such expressions are subject to the distributional constraints typical of main clause phenomena, while others are not. The former have received a fairly homogeneous syntactic analysis, implicating specific left peripheral projections. The non-restricted variety, however, is not analysed uniformly with some phenomena receiving a fully syntactic account and others being accounted for in terms of semantics and pragmatics.

This paper examines quasi-monoclausal left-peripheral analyses of Englishit-clefts. Though attractive because such analyses bring out commonalities betweenit-clefts on the one hand and focus fronting andwh-questions on the other, the range of word order variations available in Englishit-clefts reveals that such monoclausal analyses ofit-clefts lead to considerable complications of implementation, ultimately undoing the gain in terms of economy that initially would seem to justify them. In particular, we will show that, on closer inspection, the presumed focus fronting init-clefts cannot be targeting the position deployed for ‘regular’ left-peripheral focus fronting. Moreover, both implementations of the monoclausal analysis discussed make the wrong predictions with respect to the distribution ofit-clefts. In particular, as already argued by Hooper & Thompson (1973) and Emonds (1976), Englishit-clefting, unlike ‘regular’ focus fronting, is not a main clause phenomenon. Given these objections, we conclude that the left-peripheral analyses ofit-clefts are ill-founded.

The empirical focus of the chapter is the morphosyntax of the morphologically marked response particles ja and neen in the Lapscheure dialect of West Flemish. Building on Krifka (2013)’s analysis of the corresponding German response particles ja/nein as TP pro-forms, we analyze morphologically marked Flemish ja/neen as TP pro-forms. First we show that the morphological marking on these particles is sui generis : it does not correspond to the marking found on verbs nor does it correspond to a clitic form of the subject pronoun. We develop a cartographic analysis of the syntax of the morphologically marked response particles in the dialect, endorsing Rizzi and Shlonsky (2006, 2007)’s proposal that a finite TP is dominated by a specialized projection for the subject, SubjP, a criterial projection. The pronominal marking on ja/neen is an instantiation of finiteness. If all finite clauses have SubjP then the finite TP pro-form realized by morphologically marked ja/neen is also dominated by (the criterial) SubjP. In the absence of an overt subject, following Rizzi and Shlonsky (2006, 2007), we assume that the Subject Criterion is satisfied by nominal φ-features generated on Fin and that morphologically marked ja/neen moves to Fin in order to license these features. Our analysis predicts that West Flemish morphologically marked ja/neen are a root phenomenon. In addition to the variant with pronominal marking, there is also a bare variant of the ja/neen pro-forms. The presence and absence of the pronominal marking on ja/neen correlates fairly closely with the distribution of finite and non-finite clauses, and we correlate the presence vs. absence of pronominal marking with a finiteness opposition.

Several proposals suggest a φ-feature dependency between C0 and T0 (see, e.g., Zwart 1993 , Chomsky 2008 ). In most (if not all) of these proposals, the core piece of empirical evidence is complementizer agreement (CA). On the basis of two sets of CA data, CA with coordinated subjects and CA with external possessors, we conclude that there is no φ-feature dependency between C0 and T0; instead, C0 and T0 must each be endowed with a discrete set of φ-features.

In this review we evaluate two textbook introductions to the Minimalist Program (MP), the most recent incarnation of the Chomskyan paradigm:Analysing English sentencesandAn introduction to English sentence structure, both by Andrew Radford. Since there are no significant differences between the two books, our review focuses on the first version, which is slightly longer than the second.

By analogy with the movement analysis of temporal clauses, some authors have proposed that conditional clauses be derived by leftward operator movement (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006, Arsenijević 2009, Tomaszewicz 2009). This movement analysis of conditional clauses is shown to account for the incompatibility of main clause phenomena and conditional clauses in terms of intervention effects. The cartographic implementation of this analysis predicts that conditional clauses will be incompatible with speaker-oriented modal expressions and that conditional clauses will lack the low-construal reading found in temporal clauses (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006). Thus, the absence of low construal in conditional clauses, which was initially taken to be an obstacle for the movement account of conditional clauses (see Citko 2000), becomes an argument in its favor.

This article examines the formalization of negative concord in terms of the Minimalist Program, focusing entirely on negative concord in West Flemish. It is shown that a recent analysis of negative concord that advocates Multiple Agree is empirically inadequate. Instead of Multiple Agree, a particular implementation of the simpler and less powerful binary Agree proves superior in deriving the data in question.

In the literature it has been proposed that temporal adverbial clauses can be derived bywh-movement of an operator (e.g.when) to the left periphery (Geis 1970, 1975; Enç 1987: 655; Larson 1987, 1990; Dubinsky & Williams 1995; Declerck 1997; Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004: 165–70). After reviewing the arguments that have been proposed in favour of such a movement analysis, the article provides additional empirical evidence in support of the analysis. The data concern so-called Main Clause Phenomena (MCP) or Root phenomena, that is, syntactic phenomena such as argument fronting, Locative Inversion, preposing aroundbe, VP preposing and Negative Inversion, which in English are by and large restricted to main clauses. The unavailability of these MCP in temporal adverbial clauses follows directly from the movement account. The movement analysis will be extended to conditional clauses and factive clauses.

This paper compares two cartographic analyses of English it-clefts: Belletti’s embedded analysis is a cartographic reinterpretation of existing analyses. It assimilates the syntax of clefts to that of relative clauses. The matrix analysis, first proposed by Meinunger 1996 and fully explored in Frascarelli and Ramaglia (in press) assimilates the syntax of it-clefts with that of focus movement and question formation. The matrix analysis, though attractive, faces a number of problems of implementation that are not faced by the embedded approach.

This paper investigates the restrictions on movement to the left periphery found in non-root environments such as French central adverbial clauses and argues that an analysis of main clause phenomena based on intervention/Relativized Minimality is to be preferred to one based on structural truncation. The empirical basis for this claim consists of an examination of some asymmetries between French infinitival TP ellipsis and infinitival TP Topicalization. Adopting Authier's (2011) approach to TP ellipsis whereby the to-be-elided TP undergoes fronting in the computational component but fails to be spelled out at PF, we argue that these asymmetries follow from the fact that in French, while a spelled out fronted TP is an intervener for wh-movement in adverbial clauses, leading to a PF crash, the ellipsis of this fronted TP leads to a convergent derivation via Boskovic's (2011) mechanism of "rescue by PF deletion." This account entails that adverbial clauses involve wh-movement (Haegeman 2006, among others) and that the landing site for TP Topicalization is available in a non-root environment, two conclusions that militate against the hypothesis that non-root clauses have an impoverished left periphery.

On the basis of data drawn mainly from West Flemish, this squib examines to what extent the anaphor agreement effect ('Anaphors do not occur in syntactic positions construed with agreement') can capture DP-internal (non)occurrence of reciprocals as prenominal possessors.

The purpose of this squib is to show that in addition to the generally accepted distinction between fronted arguments, we need to introduce a further distinction between fronted adjuncts resulting from long-distance movement. It turns out that, distributionally, long-fronted adjuncts are in many respects more like fronted arguments than like the short fronted adjuncts. The author will first show the need for making this distinction on the basis of English data and then provide some comparative data in support

This paper focuses on the expression of sentential negation in West Flemish (WF), which it examines with respect to competing theories for deriving the West Germanic verb-final sentence pattern. The empirical adequacy of three hypotheses proposed to account for the verb-final order in the West Germanic languages is tested: (i) the ‘traditional’ OV analysis with head-final base structures; (ii) an antisymmetric approach with only head-complement order and without V-to-I movement; (iii) an antisymmetric approach with head-complement order, but with V-to-I movement and remnant movement of the projection containing the trace of V. Specifically, the question is asked to what extent these analyses capture the surface distribution of WF negation markers (niet, en and negative quantifiers). The paper shows that the traditional OV analysis is certainly adequate for the description of the data concerned. As far as antisymmetric approaches are concerned, a double movement analysis fares better than antisymmetric approaches without V-to-I movement. The paper also shows that, contrary to what has often been assumed, the WF morpheme en is not necessarily analysed as the head of NegP, the canonical projection to encode sentential negation, but that it could also plausibly be analysed as the head of PolP, a higher functional projection which encodes polarity.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I want to show that, contrary to what is sometimes claimed in the literature, NP-adjuncts of the kind tomorrow, last week, etc., are attested sentence-medially in English. This pattern would seem to be particularly frequent in journalistic prose. Second, I examine and refute an analysis which takes such sentence-medial NP-adjuncts to be analysed as IP-external adjuncts across which the subject has been topicalised or focalised. Though such an analysis would be in keeping with the often proposed view that NP-adjuncts do not occupy an IP-internal position, I show that it raises a host of empirical problems and that it is not tenable. The conclusion is that NP-adjuncts cannot be analysed as being IP-external and that they occupy a high IP-internal position.

Chomsky (1973) attributes the island status of nominal subjects to the Subject Condition, a constraint specific to subjects. English and Spanish are inter ­ esting languages for the comparative study of extraction from subjects, because subjects in English are predominantly preverbal, whereas in Spanish they can be either preverbal or postverbal. In this paper we argue that the islandhood of sub ­ ject DPs in both English and Spanish is not categorical. The degradation associ­ ated with extraction from subjects must be attributed to the interplay of a range of more general constraints which are not specific to subjects. We argue that the interaction of these constraints has a cumulative effect whereby the more constraints that are violated, the higher the degree of degradation that results. We also argue that some speakers have a greater tolerance for constraint viola­ tions than others, which would account for widespread inter ­speaker judgment

The present paper consists of two parts. We first show that the Flemish preverbal morpheme en in negative sentences differs from superficially similar items in other languages such as French both in terms of distribution and in terms of interpretation: Flemish en is dependent on finite Tense and conveys contrastive focus on the negative polarity of the clause. In the second part of the paper, we develop a new syntactic analysis of en and argue that although en syntactically encodes (low) focus, the contrastive effects associated with it are pragmatically inferred through the interaction of the focal interpretation with the discourse context. That is, we conclude that focus and contrast can be dissociated and that not all expressions of contrast are syntacticized.

This article is concerned with subject omission in English diaries, a phenomenon that has often been taken to be the adult analogue of subject omission in child language. This hypothesis is based on the observation that, as is the case in subject omission in the child language, subject omission in the adult diary style is restricted to root contexts. We show that this restriction to root contexts is not absolute and that in recent British English, some varieties of diary style and of abbreviated registers do allow for embedded subject omission. We postulate that such data illustrate dialectal variation in the diary style. Further data suggest that diaries with embedded subject omission are more liberal with respect to pronoun ellipsis in other contexts (reflexives, coordination).