Resumen de The syntax of registers: diary subject omission and the privilege of the root
This paper examines register-based language internal variation, focussing on subject omission in English diaries. This register-specific pattern might be seen as some kind of ‘extragrammatical’ culturally-determined stylistic convention associated with this particular register, but a survey of the relevant data shows that the omission of the subject in diary styles is subject to the core syntactic constraints that have been identified in formal syntax. Importantly, the observed restrictions on subject omission do not follow from a purely functional account according to which recoverable subjects can be omitted: while recoverability certainly plays a role, there are precise constraints on the syntactic positions in which recoverable subjects can be omitted.
The empirical generalisation that emerges is that subjects can be omitted in root clauses. Moreover, apart from fronted adjuncts no other constituent can precede the non-overt subject. The generalisation applies both to English and to French.
The paper develops an account for subject omission which, in addition to standard assumptions about phrase structure, makes use of (i) the Phase based theory of truncation, (ii) the hypothesis of the articulated subject field.
It is shown that other instantiations of subject omission such as that found, for instance, in note style journalese or in Samuel Beckett's poem Rockaby (Bianchi, 2007), are governed by the same principles, suggesting that the pattern is subject to grammatical constraints which are not exclusively tied to the specific register. That the type of subject omission identified here should be analysed in terms of core grammatical principles is confirmed by the fact that subject ellipsis in second conjuncts, a phenomenon which is independent of register variation, is subject to the same restrictions as subject omission in the diary style and can be accounted for using the hypotheses developed here. The conclusion I draw from this discussion is that the grammatical patterns displayed by what might seem a culturally determined linguistic system are fully amenable to core principles and parameters of universal grammar
