litic Climbing and Null Subject Languages

Null Values in Programming Languages

Even though many programming languages support a distinguished null or nil value for pointer or reference types to indicate that a pointer or reference currently does not refer to any object, none of these languages supports null values as a general concept for all types of the language. This inability to explicitly express a null or missing value raises several questions when defining the sema...

The Null Subject Parameter revisited. The evolution from null subject Spanish and Portuguese to Dominican Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

This paper analyzes changes in the null subject parameter in Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese varieties. Assuming a Minimalist framework that ascribes parametric variation to differences in lexical settings, it is argued that increased frequency of overt pronominals and an anti-locality principle against Spec, head grammatical interactions trigger a shift from interpretable to unintep...

Null Subject Behavior in the Attrition of Brazilian Portuguese

The syntax of referential null subjects in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is the topic of much recent work (Kato & Negrão 2000; Ferreira 2000, 2004; Martins & Nunes 2005, 2010; Modesto 2000; Rodrigues 2002, 2004). In light of the Interface Hypothesis (Tsimpli, Sorace 2006), uninterpretable features such as purely syntactical elements should not undergo attrition. This study tests whether this theory...

Metacognitive (Rending) Strategies Across Languages and Techniques

Climbing The Path To Grammar: A Maximum Entropy Model Of Subject/Object Learning

In this paper, we discuss an applic ation of Maximum Entropy to modeling the acquisition of subject and object processing in Italian. The model is able to learn from corpus data a set of experimentally and theoretically well-motivated linguistic constraints, as well as their relative salience in Italian grammar development and processing. The model is also shown to acquire robust syntactic gene...