This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the “richness” of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen's Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen's Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.

中文翻译：

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协议融合和空主题的丢失：中世纪法语的量化模型

本文研究了空主题的可用性与口头主题协议的“丰富性”之间的依赖性质，称为 Taraldsen 的概括（Adams，1987；Rizzi，1986；Roberts，2014；Taraldsen，1980）。我们提出了一个基于语料库的跨中世纪法国时期的口头主题一致化的量化模型，并评估了两个与一致和无效主题相关的假设：一个将两者作为相同语法属性的反射和一个基于变分学习的假设，即语音学- 驱动的一致性标记融合会产生针对空主题语法的学习偏差。我们表明，只有后一种方法才有可能调和 Taraldsen 背后的直觉