While we’re on the Subject...
Nigel Duﬃeld
In contrast to most of the other contributors to this webschrift, I have not known
Liliane Haegeman in any of the usual professional roles: she has never been mydepartment colleague, teacher or mentor (in the obvious sense); indeed, overthe years we have met in person no more than a handful of times. Yet for mostof my career Liliane has been a constant familiar, guiding and supporting my efforts to understand syntax and language acquisition better than would otherwise
have been possible. A ‘shoulder angel’ of sorts—always of the good kind. Why
she ever took on this role is not something I can explain, though I suspect I’m
not the only one to beneﬁt from her altruistic advice and generosity of spirit. Ingratitude, I oﬀer the following recollection of two early occasions where her interventions were most telling. As it turns out, neither of the questions that I wastrying to address received a satisfactory solution at the time. This most likely
reﬂects failures on my part, and since these shortcomings would have gone unnoticed but for her, perhaps I shouldn’t be so grateful. On the other hand—and
this is the justiﬁcation for this contribution—the two problems have remained
something of an embarrassment for standard versions of generative theory eversince, and it seems right that they should be dusted oﬀ in her honour. With luck,
this will encourage a new generation of linguists to ﬁnd more imaginative solutions, or at least not reinvent the wheel.

1

Subjects, Case and Negation in Hiberno-English

Almost exactly thirty years ago, I wrote my ﬁrst term paper in graduate school.
Titled A Case for Default Values, it examined the origins of certain constructions
found in Hiberno-English (HE), ﬁrst brought to general attention by P. L. Henry(1977).1 In the original paper, subsequently presented at WECOL (Duﬃeld 1989),
1

P. L. Henry is no relation of Alison Henry, as far as I’m aware. In his work, Henry (1977) uses
the term Anglo-Irish, which is now generally dispreferred: see Filppula (2002), for discussion. I105

the main concern was to account for the acceptability of HE examples such as
those in (1) and (2) below, all of which are grammatically unacceptable in standard varieties of English (on both sides of the Atlantic):
(1)

a.
b.
c.
d.

‘T’is an aise to the gate, they to be married.’‘T’was a loss to the country, Michael to die.’‘She to go and he to follow her, t’is the best anymore.’‘Typical,’ said Morrissey, as she walked away, ‘a female like that tospoil a funeral.’2

(2)

a.

‘...surely not knowing the way, they just give him a slap or something
like that and he, oh he to be afraid of the life of him.’‘D’you mind the day, and we in the old castle?’‘I heard the hens cacklin’, and I went over to see what it was, and here
it was a fox, and he with a hen.’b.
c.

As should be clear, the theoretical interest of such sentences lies in the nominative case-marking on non-ﬁnite subjects, most evident in those examples involving pronominal subjects (1a), (1c): then and still, these sentences oﬀer a prima
facie challenge to traditional generativist assumptions linking nominative caseto ﬁniteness (Chomsky 1981, Pesetsky & Torrego 2002; cf. Szabolcsi 2009, esp.
McFadden & Sundaresan 2011).3
The speciﬁc question I was concerned with at the time was whether theapparent ‘default subject case’ option had arisen in Hiberno-English throughcontact with Modern Irish; alternatively, whether the Hiberno-English inﬁnitival
construction was the vestige of a licensing option previously observed in ‘mainland’ Early Modern English. Both hypotheses are supported by circumstantial
evidence. On the one hand, as discussed in Chung & McCloskey (1987), Modern Irish freely allows overt subjects in small clauses in the absence of any obviremain indebted to Markku Filppula for giving me access to the data exempliﬁed in (5) below.
2William Trevor, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (The Bodley Head, 1969).
3
A diﬀerent strand of the same thread, originating with Raposo (1987), linked nominative
case-marking to Agreement, rather than Tense: in Raposo’s work, inﬁnitival clauses in European
Portuguese were claimed to license nominative case just in case the non-ﬁnite verb was inﬂectedfor person agreement. Subsequent work by Pires (2002), mentioned in Sundaresan & McFadden(2009), shows that varieties of Brazilian Portuguese without agreement nevertheless continue toallow nominative-marked subjects; see also Longa (1994), Landau (2004). These facts lead thelatter authors to conclude that person agreement is coincidental, rather than causal. However
this should be analyzed, it will be clear that morphological Agreement (with or without a capitalletter) is irrelevant to non-ﬁnite clauses in all varieties of Present Day English.

106

ous licensor—albeit these are marked with accusative, rather than nominative,
case—see (3) below; on the other hand, Late Middle English and Early Modern
English apparently tolerated nominative subjects in the same non-ﬁnite contexts, as evidenced by the examples in (4) from Visser (1963), see also Sundaresan & McFadden (2009).
(3)

a.

b.

c.

(4)

a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.

Bhuail mé leis,agus [s édhá mhíle as baile ].
struck I with-him and him.ACC 2 miles from home
‘I met him, as he was two miles from home.’Tháinig sé isteach, agus [s éiontach sásta leisféin].
came he inside, and him.ACC very
happy with-him self
‘He came in very happy with himself.’(Chung & McCloskey 1987)
Is mór an suaimhneas don gheata [s iada bheith
is great the easeto-the gate s them-ACC to be-VN
pósta].
married].
‘T’is an aise to the gate they to be married.’ (Henry 1957; cf. (1a)above)
I to make me blith or glad ... [th]at nu mai be...
[14th C]A king to kepe his lygis in justice, Without doute that is his oﬃse...
[1385]
Men to seye to women wel, it is best, And nor for to despise hem nedepraue.
[1402]A preest for to freli take and chose of alle maidens to hem a wijf...wasallowed of Poul
[1449]
Thou to love that loueth not the, is but grete foly.
[1470]She to dy so dangerously ... that was the thing that greued me so.
[1570]

Partly due to the paucity of historical evidence, the provenance issue was not resolved, and this parochial phenomenon might have completely escaped furtherattention, were it not for the availability of another non-standard subject typefound in (some of) the same HE varieties, namely, NPI-subjects in ﬁnite mainclauses, as shown in (5):(5)

a.

But from that day out, anyone that was on the meitheal, or anyone
in the parish never said a bit t’him, or never done…made a move tohave sport on him…
107

b.
c.

Aha. Although anybody don’ seem to like to live in Russia...They’re
all trying to get out of it…
you couldn’t pick a daisy but it was a sin. Now, anything is no sin...

In a follow-up conference paper, I sought to relate the grammaticality of thesetwo constructions to a third HE anomaly, namely, the phenomenon of Singular
Concord (SC) observed in Belfast English, discussed in A. M. Henry (1992, 1995),
whereby plural lexical NPs in canonical position can appear with default (singular) agreement—in contrast to pronominal and/or inverted subjects, which always require plural agreement. Compare the examples in (6):
(6)

a.
b.

Them eggs is cracked/*They is cracked/They are cracked.
Them ones wants more than them other ones/What do/*does themones want?

Extending Henry’s (1992, 1995) account of SC, it was proposed that matrix clauses in HE and Early Modern English varieties diﬀer(ed) from Standard varieties in containing a higher functional projection (AgrP) above TP(AgrP^NegP^TP), and in allowing default case to be assigned in (non-root) Spec,TP; cf. McCloskey (2001). Given this parametric option, underspeciﬁed DPs lacking person features (6: them eggs) need raise no higher than TP for Case, andneed not agree (is shows default singular agreement). Subject NPIs (5: anyone
was...) are then licensed in virtue of having a case-marked copy within the scopeof negation (Duﬃeld 1992/1993). On this approach, the diachronic loss of nominative subjects in inﬁnitivals in Standard English—as well as absence of the othertwo properties—was taken to stem from the loss of AgrP, and subsequent reanalysis of the root projection as TP, as diagrammed in (7); cf. Roberts (1993).
(7)[AgrP [NegP [TP [NOM] ... ]]] → [TP [NOM] [Neg [ ... ]]]The analysis is undoubtedly outdated, most notably in its construal of AgrP as
an autonomous functional projection, and in its appeal to Case as a licensor andas principal driver of syntactic movement to Spec, TP (Chomsky 2001, cf. Nevins
2004). Even at the time, the analysis was probably seriously ﬂawed. Yet it did
at least draw a connection between two kinds of anomalous subject that mostgenerative researchers had totally ignored up to that point. Just as importantly
from a personal point of view, the analysis apparently had suﬃcient merit to persuade Liliane to include it in a special issue of Rivista di Linguistica, on the syntaxof sentential negation (Haegeman 1993). Which in turn gave me my ﬁrst journal108article and—I suspect (though cannot prove)—led to my ﬁrst job after graduate
school.4

2Pro-drop in Early Child German

If Liliane’s invitation helped me into my ﬁrst paid employment, as a post-doc inHarald Clahsen’s LEXLERN project on child German, her support of the research
begun there also helped me into the next position, at McGill.5 Once again, the focus of this work was on anomalous subjects: this time, however, on null-subjects
in German.
As is well-known—implicitly to native-speakers, explicitly to professional linguists and German language teachers—Standard German is not a pro-drop language: as in English, the subjects of ﬁnite clauses must be pronounced. Yet
viewed from the bottom up—which is to say, from the PLD perspective of thechild learner—this ban on null-subjects is quite unexpected. This is for threereasons that also distinguish German from English: ﬁrst, German is a ‘topicdrop’ language, allowing omission of initial topics (8); second, it allows nullexpletives (except in initial position) (9); ﬁnally, it has a relatively rich personnumber verb-agreement paradigm, something that is often considered key topro-identiﬁcation; Rohrbacher (1993), cf. Bobaljik (1997).
(8)

a.

b.

c.

(Ich) hab es gestern gekauft.
(I) have it yesterday bought‘I bought it yesterday.’(Er) sagt, daß *(er) es gestern gekauft hat.
(he) says, COMP (he) it yesterday bought has‘He says he bought it yesterday.’
Gestern hab’ *(ich) es gekauft.
yesterday have (I)it bought‘I bought it yesterday.’4

As hard as it is to believe now, having one journal article published before completing graduate school counted as a distinguishing achievement in the early 1990s.
5
Or it might have been my next job (University of Sheﬃeld). The lag between initial presentation of the data at acquisition conferences in 1992-93, submission of the initial draft of the paper,
hiatuses between revisions, and ﬁnal publication in 2008, spanned 15 years, during which time
Liliane’s support both as known commentator and as anonymous reviewer proved invaluable.

109

(9)

a.

b.

... daß ec dem Mann das Buch
geschenkt wurde.
that the. DAT man the-.NOM bookpresented[Biberauer 2008]
became‘... that the book was given to the man (as a present).
.. weilec jadochLinguisten
Kammermusik
because MOD.PART. linguists chamber-music playspielen‘... since there are linguists playing chamber music.’

So what do young German children think about null subjects? That was thefocus of my two-year study in Düsseldorf, which compared the Strong Continuity/Very Early Parameter Setting claims of Rizzi (1994, 2000), Wexler (1994,1998) and others, with the Weak Continuity/Structure Building approach of theLEXLERN project (Clahsen & Penke 1992, Clahsen et al. 1994, 1996); cf. Haegeman (1996). The two approaches to early syntax diverged most sharply on theissue of postverbal null-subjects in ﬁnite V2 clauses, termed ‘Rogues’ in Duﬃeld(1992/1993, 2008): whereas Strong Continuity approaches predicted their nonoccurrence—Root Inﬁnitive subjects aside, German children should never entertain the possibility of a null-subject grammar—the Weak Continuity predicted
the opposite, namely, it was expected that children should pass through a stage
after the development of an underspeciﬁed AgrP (but prior to the developmentof CP) during which Rogues should be a grammatical option. Data from fourout of six LEXLERN6 children whose transcribed corpus data I analyzed provide
rather clear support for the latter approach: not only did all of these children
produce Rogues, such as those illustrated in (10), but in each case, these wereonly observed at signiﬁcant levels within one developmental window, just before their production of ﬁnite complement clauses.
(10)

a.

b.

6Einen Strohhalm mach’ec jetzt. (Matthias.22: 089)
astraw
make-1
now‘I’m making a straw now.’
So sieht ec das nicht. (Katrin.07: 021)
so see-3that not‘That way, he doesn’t see it.’

In fact, the study drew on data from three separate corpora, to which the project had access.

110

c.

Die Margot hab’ec gehört. (Svenja.06: 134a)the Margot have-1
heard‘I have heard Margot.’

Once again, my interpretation may be ﬂawed—the framework has surely beensuperceded, AgrP is so 1990s—but the data remain, as a thorn in the side of those
who reject parametric approaches, and who discount any signiﬁcant learningfrom the input. And once more, had it not been for Liliane’s support and encouragement, these data would likely never have seen the light of (theoretical)
day. Even with her help, the journey took ﬁfteen years!
Thus, I use this opportunity to thank Liliane for supporting research on things
that shouldn’t be present, but are, or should be absent, but aren’t, for being so.
While we are on the subject.

References
Bobaljik, J.D. 1997. If the head ﬁts: On the morphological determination of Germanic syntax. Linguistics 35. 1029–1055.
Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. 2001. Derivation by phase. In M. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A lifein language. 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chung, S. & McCloskey, J. 1987. Government, barriers, and small clauses in Modern Irish. Linguistic Inquiry 18. 173–237.
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiß & Vainikka, A. 1994. The seeds of structure: A syntactic analysis of the acquisition of case marking. In T. Hoekstra & B. Schwartz(eds.), Language acquisition studies In Generative Grammar. 85–118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Clahsen, H., Eisenbeiß, S. & Penke, M. 1996. Lexical learning in early syntacticdevelopment. In H. Clahsen (ed.), Generative perspectives on language acquisition: Empirical ﬁndings, theoretical considerations and crosslinguistic comparisons. 129–160. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Clahsen, H. & Penke, M. 1992. The acquisition of agreement morphology and its
syntactic consequences: New evidence on German child language from theSimone-corpus. In J. Meisel (ed.), The acquisition of verb placement. 181–223.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.

111

Duﬃeld, N. 1992/1993. Roots and rogues: Null subjects in german child language. University of Düsseldorf, McGill University.
Duﬃeld, N. 2008. Roots and rogues in German child language. Language Acquisition 15. 225–269.
Filppula, M. 2002. The grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian style. London: Routledge.
Haegeman, L. 1993. Introduction to the syntax of sentential negation. Rivista diLinguistica 7. 183–214.
Haegeman, L. 1996. Verb second, the split CP and initial null subjects in Dutch.
GenGenP 4. 93–120.
Henry, A. 1992. Why we don’t agree: Singular concord in Belfast English. Ms.,
University of Ulster at Jordanstown.
Henry, A. 1995. Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect variation and parameter setting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Henry, P.L. 1957. An Anglo-Irish dialect of North Roscommon. Zurich: Aschmann& Scheller.
Henry, P.L. 1977. Anglo-Irish and its Irish background. In D. Ó Muirithe (ed.), The
English language in Ireland. 20–36. Cork: The Mercier Press.
Landau, I. 2004. The scale of ﬁniteness and the calculus of control. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22. 811–877.
Longa, V.M. 1994. The galician inﬂected inﬁnitive and the theory of ug. Catalan
Working Papers in Linguistics 4. 23–44.
McCloskey, J. 2001. On the distribution of subject properties in Irish. In W.D.
Davies & S. Dubinsky (eds.), Objects and other subjects. 157–192. Dordrecht:Kluwer.
Nevins, A. 2004. Derivations without the Activity Condition. In M. McGinnis &N. Richards (eds.), Perspectives on phases (MIT Working Papaers in Linguistics# 49). 287–310. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pesetsky, D. & Torrego, E. 2002. Tense, case and the nature of syntactic categories. In J. Guéron, J. Lecarme & A. Lecarme (eds.), The syntax of time. 495–538. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Pires, A. 2002. Cue-based change: Inﬂection and subjects in the history of portuguese inﬁnitives. In D. Lightfoot (ed.), Syntactic eﬀects of morphologicalchange. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raposo, E. 1987. Case theory and inﬂ-to-comp: The inﬂected inﬁnitive in european portuguese. Linguistic Inquiry 18. 85–109.

112Rizzi, L. 1994. Early null subjects and root null subjects. In T. Hoekstra & B.D.
Schwartz (eds.), Language acquisition studies in generative grammar. 151–176.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rizzi, L. 2000. Remarks on early null subjects. In M.A. Friedemann & L. Rizzi(eds.), The acquisition of syntax: Studies in comparative developmental linguistics. London: Longman.
Roberts, I. 1993. Verbs and diachronic syntax. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Rohrbacher, B.W. 1993. The germanic VO languages and the full paradigm: A
theory of V to I raising: University of Massachusetts Amherst dissertation.
Sundaresan, S. & McFadden, T. 2009. DP distribution and ﬁniteness in Tamil andother languages: Selection vs. Case. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 2. 5–34.
Szabolcsi, A. 2009.
Overt nominative subjects in inﬁnitival complements crosslinguistically:
Data, diagnostics, and preliminary
analyses.
NYU Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Syntax 2.
http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/departments/linguistics/
graduate/nyu-working-papers-in-linguistics.html#vol2.
Visser, F.T. 1963. An historical syntax of the english language. Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Wexler, K. 1994. Optional inﬁnitives, head movement and the economy ofderivations. In D.W. Lightfoot & N. Hornstein (eds.), Verb movement. 305–350.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wexler, K. 1998. Very early parameter-setting and the Unique Checking Constraint: A new explanation of the optional inﬁnitive stage. Lingua 106. 23–79.

113