Subjectless sentences in child Danish

Three alternative accounts of subject omission, pragmatic, processing and g rammatical, are considered from the perspective of child Danish. Longitudin al data for two Danish children are analyzed for subject omission, finite a nd infinitival verb usage and discourse anchorage of sentence subjects (ove rt and missing). The data exhibit a well-defined phase of subject omission which coincides with a well-defined phase of infinitival verbal utterances. No evidence is found for input driven accounts of subject omission. Danish adults rarely omit subjects from utterance initial position. Neither is th ere any evidence to support the claim that omitted subjects are anchored in previous discourse. Evidence supporting a processing constraint explanatio n of missing subjects is equivocal. The pattern of subject omission, infini tival usage and third person pronoun and past tense usage points to a gramm atical explanation of the phenomenon. However, current grammatical accounts have difficulty accommodating several aspects of the data reported. Contra ry to structure building theories, the Danish children do not exhibit a pha se of development where only uninflected verb forms are used. Danish childr en also omit subjects from finite utterances. Furthermore, the decline of s ubject omissions in finite utterances coincides with decline in usage of in finitival utterances. These findings challenge tense-based accounts of chil dren's subject omission. Finally, Danish children exhibit an asymmetry in s ubject omission according to verb type; subjects are omitted from main verb utterances more frequently than from copula utterances. Given the language typology associated with Danish, this asymmetry is difficult to accommodat e within truncation and tense or number-based accounts of subject omission. We suggest that a proper treatment of child subject omission will involve an integration of grammatical and discourse-based approaches. (C) 1998 Else vier Science B.V. All rights reserved.