(In)felicitous use of subjects in Greek and Spanish in monolingual and contact settings

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers, were analysed to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun, expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were also found to be felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.

本文聚焦于希腊语和智利西班牙语中的主语分布情况，这两种语言都是零主语语言，这在单语和双语使用者的口语产出中有所体现。对40名单语者和76名不同类型的双语者（即第一代移民、传承语使用者和第二语言使用者）所引出的叙述进行了分析，以探究这些群体在单语和接触环境中在表达主语指称方面的潜在差异。对话题连续性和话题转换语境的定性分析表明，显性主语代词的使用范围没有过度扩展，而根据接口假说（索拉奇，2011年，2012年）和先前的研究，这种情况预计会在双语表现中出现。研究结果还表明，在话题连续性语境中观察到的词汇主语冗余大多涉及恰当的（语用上合适的）结构。此外，虽然在话题转换中的零主语在单语者和双语者中也被发现是恰当的，但在这种话语语境中，双语表现中出现了歧义情况。