Adult Null Subjects in the non-pro-drop Languages: Two Diary Dialects

This article is concerned with subject omission in English diaries, a phenomenon that has often been taken to be the adult analogue of subject omission in child language. This hypothesis is based on the observation that, as is the case in subject omission in the child language, subject omission in the adult diary style is restricted to root contexts. We show that this restriction to root contexts is not absolute and that in recent British English, some varieties of diary style and of abbreviated registers do allow for embedded subject omission. We postulate that such data illustrate dialectal variation in the diary style. Further data suggest that diaries with embedded subject omission are more liberal with respect to pronoun ellipsis in other contexts (reflexives, coordination).