As a so-called non-null subject language, it has been proposed that in English, unexpressed subjects occur only in registers that have specific grammatical properties. We test this hypothesis through a comparison of the conditioning of subject expression for third-person singular human specific subjects in English conversation and narrative. Despite a stark difference in the rates of nonexpression (4% in conversation vs. 22% in narratives), there is no evidence of different grammars across the registers—in both, outside of coreferential clauses conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects only occur in prosodic initial position in main clause declaratives. Within the variable context, in both registers, expression is sensitive to accessibility, priming, and temporal sequentiality. A register effect is, however, evident in the contextual distribution, with a larger proportion of the narrative tokens occurring in contexts propitious to unexpressed subjects, and it is this that accounts for the higher rate of nonexpression in this register.

中文翻译：

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不同的寄存器，不同的语法？英语会话和叙事中的主题表达

作为一种所谓的非空主语，有人提出，在英语中，未表达的主语只出现在具有特定语法属性的语域中。我们通过比较英语会话和叙事中第三人称单数人类特定主题的主题表达条件来检验这一假设。尽管不表达的比率存在明显差异（对话中为 4%，叙述中为 22%），但没有证据表明整个语域的语法不同——在这两种情况下，除了与并列连词连接的共指从句之外，只出现未表达的主题在主句陈述句的韵律起始位置。在变量上下文中，在两个寄存器中，表达式对可访问性、启动和时间顺序都很敏感。然而，注册效果是，