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

Abstract

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 both quantitatively and qualitatively 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 found to be mostly felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.