Are Lexical Subjects Deviant?

0 Introduction The canonical word order of English is generally taken to be SVO, where S and O are assumed to be lexical, i.e., non-pronominal (cf. Lambrecht 1987), as in (1) below. 2 (1) The news coverage showed all the, you know, the guys who didn't get hurt coming home. In the example in 1 we see that the lexical NP the news coverage is the subject of the sentence. While this sentence looks like a typical English sentence (cf. Sapir 1921), the lexical SVO assumption for conversation has been challenged in the literature. Lambrecht (1987:218) suggests lexical SVO may not be the predominant pattern for spoken discourse in any language. Similarly, Du Bois (1987) suggests lexical transitive arguments are highly constrained in conversation across languages. Such arguments are based on a plethora of data concerning the distribution of lexical subjects both in English and cross-linguistically. The general finding is that lexical subjects in English conversation are rare (Du Bois 1987, Givón 1983b, Lambrecht 1994). The rarity of lexical subjects in English conversation, coupled with a profound difference in coding preferences for subject versus object position, leads us to consider lexical subjects to be a marked linguistic choice. We propose an explanation for the markedness of lexical subjects based on Lambrecht's (1994) PRINCIPLE OF SEPARATION OF REFERENCE AND ROLE (PSRR). Lexical subjects represent a conflation of two pragmatic functions that are ordinarily accomplished in sequence: establishing a new topic and commenting about that topic. However, the small class of lexical subjects exhibits subregularities. We will argue that their morphosyntactic properties can be seen as a balancing between two halves of the GRICEAN QUANTITY MAXIM, as described by Horn (1984). We begin in §1 with a review of the function of subjects in English and the distribution of lexical versus pronominal NPs. In §2 we discuss the properties of lexical subjects in a corpus of spoken English. In §3 we consider the Principle of Separation of Reference and Role as a constraint on subject position in English and propose that speakers who violate this principle do so to conserve effort. In §4 we discuss the morphosyntactic coding of the small class of lexical subjects as evidence that speakers' productions involve attempts to mediate between hearer-and speaker-based constraints. We conclude in §5 that although lexical subjects in conversation are new, the speaker ensures recoverability of their referent from the discourse through morphosyntactic …