2.1 Participants

As we mentioned in Section 1, 45 subjects participated in this study: 15 Italian Natives; 15 Greek Natives, 15 L2ers of Italian with Greek as their L1.

Italian Natives (9 male; 6 female) had a mean age of 28 (range 19–58). They were born in Italy and had been living there until the time of testing. Six of them had a university degree, while nine had a high school degree and were attending university. All reported at least a basic knowledge of an additional language, other than Greek.

Greek Natives (7 male; 8 female) had a mean age of 30 (range 19–58). They were born in Greece and had been living there until the time of testing. Seven of them had a university degree, while eight had a high school degree and were attending university. All reported at least a basic knowledge of an additional language, other than Italian.

L2ers (6 male; 9 female) had a mean age of 32 (range 21–52). They were born in Greece and had lived there for at least the first 18 years of their lives. They were tested in Italy, where they were living at the time of testing. The length of their residence in Italy was 8 years on average (range 1–17). Their mean age of onset of exposure to Italian was 20, ranging from 15 to 28. As for their education, eight of them had a university degree and seven had a high school degree and were attending university in Italy. All reported at least a basic knowledge of an additional language, other than Italian and Greek.

A Welch t-test reveals no significant group differences as far as age is concerned: Italian Natives and L2ers (p = 0.19), L2ers and Greek Natives (p = 0.65), Italian Natives and Greek Natives (p = 0.65).

2.2 The near-nativeness test

Since one of the aims of this study is to compare native and near-native speakers, participants were first administered an adaptation of White & Genesee’s (1996) near-nativeness test. This test was developed by its authors precisely to identify very advanced L2 speakers, which are ‘virtually indistinguishable from native speakers’ (White and Genesee 1996: 242). In our adaptation, three native speakers of Italian and three native speakers of Greek evaluated the oral productions of the participants (in Italian and in Greek respectively), pointing out, on a line of 10 cm., their judgment with respect to five distinct aspects: morphology, syntax, vocabulary, pronunciation, fluency. A speaker is considered near-native if her mean value ranges from 8.5 to 9.5.⁸ Our L2ers had a mean near-nativeness value in Italian of 8.89 (range 8.50–9.33; Standard Deviation 0.265). Italian Natives had a mean value of 9.76 (range 9.64–9.96; SD 0.107) and Greek Natives had a mean value of 9.82 (range 9.60–10; SD 0.116), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Near-nativeness values in Italian Natives (IN), L2ers (L2) and Greek Natives (GN).

The data appear to be normally distributed (a Shapiro test reveals a p-value of 0.295). An ANOVA reveals a highly significant group difference (p < 0.001). A post-hoc pair-wise t-test reveals that this difference is highly significant between L2ers and Italian Natives (p < 0.001) and between L2ers and Greek Natives (p < 0.001), but non-significant between Italian Natives and Greek Natives (p = 0.29).

2.3 Elicitation procedure and definition of the Reference Total

Subjects were asked to watch a short movie containing no linguistic material (The Pear Film, Chafe 1980) and then tell the story. They were tested individually in a quiet room and the interviewer did not linguistically interact with them during their narration. Italian Natives and L2ers were tested in Italian, Greek Natives were tested in Greek. Their productions were recorded and then transcribed with the help of the CLAN system (part of the CHILDES tools, Mac Whinney 2000), deriving the General Total. As shown in Table 2, and exemplified in (7)–(20), a great variety of clausal types are attested:

In many of these clausal types, however, no true choice between a lexical or pronominal (null or overt) subject is possible, because their subject is syntactically determined. This is so in Italian infinitival sentences, where the subject is generally assumed to be PRO, and in the corresponding Greek na and ke clauses embedded under certain kinds of predicates (see Spyropoulos 2007 a. o.). This is so also in Italian existential constructions and in the corresponding Greek ine and echi presentatives (Creissels 2014), in gerundive, participial, adjectival and prepositional Small Clauses (Stowell 1983), in pseudo-relatives (Cinque 1992), and in subject relatives. Finally, in subject clefts the (focused) subject cannot be null, hence no true choice is possible. For this reason, we extracted from the General Total only those clausal types in which the subject can be chosen clause-internally by the speaker, i.e., finite (including ‘independent’ Greek na clauses, ‘other na’ in Table 2) and copular sentences as well as non-subject relatives and non-subject clefts. We then excluded those sentences where a discourse referent was introduced for the first time, since first mentions are always lexical. We also excluded finite sentences referring to the narrator, or narrator+interviewer, since they were in the first person (singular or plural) and hence only pronouns, and not lexical DPs, could be chosen in these contexts. In this way we obtained what we call the Reference Total, which consists of 495 sentences for Italian Natives, 370 sentences for L2ers and 640 sentences for Greek Natives.

2.4 Overall results

Within this Reference Total we counted the occurrences of referential null pronouns, overt pronouns and lexical DPs. We identified also a fourth category of anaphoric devices, that we call ‘other’, which consists of quantified expressions without lexical restriction, such as e.g. It. uno (lit. ‘one’), tutti (‘all’) or Gr. enas apo aftous (‘one of them’). Results are shown in Table 3.

As Table 3 shows, pro is by far the anaphoric device most employed by all groups, followed by lexical DPs. Overt pronouns are quite few, as well as ‘other’. For what concerns between-group comparisons, we note, first of all, a higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers with respect to Italian Natives and Greek Natives.

As far as the statistical analysis is concerned, for pair-wise comparisons among groups we performed non-parametric chi-squared (c²) tests with absolute counts, while for testing overall individual variability we performed ANOVA – whenever applicable, see below – or the Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test – otherwise – to percentages of use. In case of overall significant comparisons, we performed specific post-hoc tests (t- or Nemenyi, respectively) to highlight possible pair-wise differences.

Pair-wise comparisons through Pearson’s c² test reveal that the difference concerning the use of overt pronouns is highly significant between L2ers and Italian Natives (c² = 11. 4752 with Yates correction, significant at p ≤ 0.005) and L2ers and Greek Natives (c² = 27.4266 with Yates correction, significant at p ≤ 0.005) but not between Italian Natives and Greek Natives (c² = 2.3901 with Yates correction, n. s.).¹¹ This highly significant difference is confirmed by a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test (p = 0.004). Post-hoc pair-wise comparisons using Nemenyi’s test reveal significant differences between L2ers and Greek Natives (p = 0.012) and between L2ers and Italian Natives (p = 0.023).

As for pro, pair-wise comparisons through the c² test reveal a significant difference between Greek Natives on one side and L2ers and Italian Natives on the other: Greek Natives/Italian Natives c² = 5.0911 significant at p ≤ 0.05: Greek Natives/L2ers c² = 12.0309, significant at p ≤ 0.005; Italian Natives/L2ers c² = 1.7145, n. s. This significant difference, however, is not confirmed by the Kruskal-Wallis test, which reveals a p-value of 0.799 (n. s.).

No significant differences are found with respect to ‘other’ (L2ers/Italian Natives c² = 0.3334 with Yates correction, n. s.; L2ers/Greek Natives c² = 0.9659 with Yates correction, n. s.; Italian Natives/Greek Natives c² = 0.0474 with Yates correction n. s.; Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test: p = 0.779) or lexical DPs (L2ers/Italian Natives c² = 0.4078, n. s.; L2ers/Greek Natives c² = 0.8745, n. s; Italian Natives/Greek Natives c² = 3.0822 n. s); Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test: p = 0.295, n. s.).

Results of the statistical analysis are summarized in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Subject anaphoric devices in Italian Natives, L2ers and Greek Natives.

A Shapiro-Wilk normality test reveals furthermore that individual percentages of use are not always normally distributed, as shown in Table 4 and as appreciable from the distributions depicted in the boxplots in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Distribution of individual percentages of use.

The fact that individual percentages of use are not normally distributed has some consequences as far as the statistical analysis is concerned, in that tests which do not require a normal distribution of the data among subjects (such as the Kruskal-Wallis test or the c² test) are to be preferred to tests that instead presuppose it (e.g. ANOVA) when analyzing our data.

2.5 Discussion

The analysis reveals two main results:

1. a higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers. The difference is highly significant both with respect to Italian Natives and Greek Natives.

2. a higher use of pro by Greek Natives, which is nearly significant.

The first result supports the finding reported by much current literature that near-native speakers over-use overt pronouns in Italian (with English as the other language: Tsimpli et al. 2004; Belletti et al. 2007; Sorace et al. 2009; with Spanish or Greek as the other language: Bini 1993; Sorace et al. 2009; Di Domenico & Baroncini 2019) as well as in other null subject languages (Margaza & Bel 2006; Lozano 2006; 2018 for Spanish L2 speakers with L1 Greek; Lozano 2016 for Spanish L2 speakers with L1 English), and beyond (Contemori & Doussias 2016 for English L2 speakers with L1 Spanish).

Our data does not support the finding that advanced L2ers over-use lexical DPs (instead of overt-pronouns which, in some studies, are claimed to be under-used) as shown, among others, by Ryan (2015) for Mandarin learners of English, Chini (2005) for German learners of Italian, Leclercq & Lenart (2013) for French learners of English and English learners of French (see Ryan 2015 for an overview), or, for German-Italian bilingual adolescents, by Torregrossa & Bongartz (2018). We will come back to these interesting findings in the final part of the paper (Section 5).

Going back to the significant over-use of overt pronouns that we found in L2ers, this result is particularly interesting because the L1 of these L2ers (Greek) is a null subject language. This in turn suggests that cross-linguistic influence from the L1 cannot be held responsible for the result, provided that differences between Greek and Italian are not observed. Indeed, differently from Di Domenico & Baroncini (2019), we found a nearly significant quantitative difference between Greek and Italian, but in the use of pro (see b) above), not of overt pronouns, which, as lexical DPs and ‘other’, are employed at a comparable rate by Italian Natives and Greek Natives. The higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers, thus, cannot be considered as due to transfer from their L1.

As far as the higher use of pro by Greek Natives is concerned, though the difference is not properly significant, it certainly deserves a closer inspection, particularly in the light of Dimitriadis’ (1996) and Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli’s (2015) proposals outlined in Section 1, which suggest, respectively, that pro in Greek has a less specific function than the overt pronoun and that it is more likely to co-refer with a non-subject antecedent when compared to Italian.

In the next section we analyze the distribution of the four subject anaphoric devices in each group’s Reference Total (Table 3 and Figures 2 and 3) in terms of topicality: since topics are d-linked (Lambrecht 1994; Rizzi 2005; 2018 a.o.) we had of course to consider them with respect to all the sentences in the General Total.

3.1 Topic conditions

When investigating semi-spontaneous productions, a division between topic continuing and topic shifting expressions appears insufficient to characterize a situation which is more variegated.

As a general rule, we code as ‘Topic Shifting’ (TS) the cases in which the topic is different from the one of the previous sentence, and ‘Topic Continuing’ (TC) the cases in which the topic is the same as in the previous sentence.¹²

There are two main exceptions to this general rule: what we call ‘parenthetical sentences’ and thetic (i.e. topic-less) sentences. Parenthetical sentences are mainly sentences which refer to the narrator or to the narrator+interviewer (‘non lo sappiamo’ [we don’t know about it]; ‘penso’ [I think]); they are ‘parenthetical’ with respect to the narration, and do not interfere with it: hence, we consider the possible shift or continuity with respect to the previous non-parenthetical sentence.

In some cases, the previous sentence is a thetic (i.e. topic-less) sentence. Thetic sentences may not introduce a new topic. In this case we calculate the possible shift or continuity with respect to the previous categorical sentence.¹³

There is, however, a further possibility: a thetic sentence introduces (or re-introduces) a referent which becomes the topic of the following sentence. In this case, we have a topic shift with respect to the previous categorical sentence, but not with respect to the (immediately preceding) thetic sentence. We code these cases as ‘non-topic continuing’ (NTc). An example is shown in (21) below:

Non-topic subjects are coded as Non-Topic (NT): they are mainly the subject of a thetic sentence (as we have seen above), but in few cases they are the subject of sentences in which the object is the topic, such as left and right dislocation constructions (see also footnote 16 below).

A further possibility is that a constituent is in an inclusion relation with (i.e. is part of) a previously introduced referent which is the topic of the previous sentence: this is neither a case of complete shift nor a case of continuity proper. We call it ‘Tincl’. An example is shown in (22), where ‘uno di loro’ is included in the previous topic, realized through pro:

The distribution of the different conditions, in terms of topicality, is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

Topic conditions in the three groups.

The different conditions are equally distributed among groups with the exception of NTc, which are quite rare in the Italian Natives corpus (and few in the L2ers corpus). This fact is not very surprising, in that Italian Natives generally restate in subject position a referent introduced as a non-subject through a pseudo-relative, a subject relative, or an acc-ing construction (see Di Domenico to appear). Topic shift or topic continuity is then calculated with respect to the latter clausal types.

3.2 Subject anaphoric devices in the different topic conditions

Subject anaphoric devices in each group’s Reference Total were then characterized in this respect. Results are shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5

Subject anaphoric devices in the different topic conditions.

In case of topic continuity (TC), all groups mostly resort to pro (Italian Natives 92.71%; L2ers 90.24%; Greek Natives 94.58%). Lexical DPs are seldom used (Italian Natives 5.96%; L2ers 1.46%; Greek Natives 3.70%). As far as overt pronouns are concerned, they are seldom used in this case by all groups (Italian Natives 1.32%; L2ers 7.80%; Greek Natives 1.70%). As far as ‘other’ is concerned, we find only a single instance in the L2ers group (0.48%).

In non-topic continuing contexts (NTc), pros are used in the 50% of the cases by Italian Natives, 80% by L2ers and 82.35% by Greek Natives. Lexical DPs are used in the 50% of the cases by Italian Natives, 10% by L2ers and 17.64% by Greek Natives. We find only a single occurrence of overt pronouns (10%) as well as of ‘other’ in the L2ers group.

In case of topic shift, pros are used in the 29.72% of the cases by Italian Natives, 28.57% by L2ers and 56.75% by Greek Natives. Lexical DPs are used in the 51.35% of the cases by Italian Natives, 46.03% by L2ers and 27.70% by Greek Natives. Topic shift contexts are the contexts in which we observe a higher use of overt pronouns by all groups: 16.21% in Italian Natives, 23.80% in L2ers, and 12.83% in Greek Natives. As for ‘other’, they are not particularly used in these contexts (2.70% by Italian Natives, 1.58% by L2ers, 2.70% by Greek Natives).

The case in which a topic is ‘included’ in the previous topic (Tincl) is the context in which ‘other’ devices are more used compared to other contexts: 46.15% in Italian Natives; 50% in L2ers; 27.27% in Greek Natives. Lexical DPs are also employed in this condition by Italian Natives (15.38%) and Greek Natives (15.15%), but not by L2ers (0%). Overt pronouns are seldom used in this condition by Italian natives (7.69%) and Greek Natives (3.03%), but more often by L2ers (33.33%). pros are employed in the 30.76% in Italian Natives, 16.66 % in L2ers, 54.54% in Greek Natives.

Non-topics are mostly realized as lexical DPs by all groups (86.66% by Italian Natives, 100% by L2ers, 89.18% by Greek Natives). Some occurrences of ‘other’ appear in Italian Natives (N = 2, 6.66%) and Greek Natives’ (N = 5, 6.75%) productions, and 2 occurrences of overt pronouns (6.66%) are attested in Italian Natives’ productions. Three occurrences of pro (4.05%) are produced by Greek Natives in this condition.

As far as between-group differences are concerned, the statistical analysis (Kruskal-Wallis and post-hoc Nemenyi tests) reveals that the higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers is highly significant in the TC condition only (p < 0.001) both with respect to Italian Natives (p = 0.023) and Greek Natives (p = 0.001). See Figure 1 of the Appendix.

The analysis also reveals some interesting differences related to pro. Greek Natives resort to pro significantly more than Italian Natives and L2ers at least in two conditions: TS (p = 0.031 with respect to Italian Natives; p = 0.004 with respect to L2ers) and Tincl (p = 0.055, nearly significant, with respect to Italian Natives; p = 0.004 with respect to L2ers).¹⁴ See Figures 2 and 3 of the Appendix.

We also found a significant difference concerning lexical DPs in the TS condition, with a global p-value of 0.041. Post hoc pair-wise comparisons reveal that significance is reached only between Italian Natives and Greek Natives (p = 0.04). See Figure 4 in the Appendix.

3.3 Discussion

Results reveal that L2ers significantly over-use overt pronouns with respect to Italian Natives and Greek Natives in case of topic continuity. This difference is highly significant. Similar results, placing the over-use of overt pronouns precisely in topic continuity contexts have been reported in many studies: by Sorace et al. (2009) for Spanish-Italian and English-Italian bilingual children, by Lozano (2018) for L2 learners of Spanish with L1 Greek, and by Lozano (2016) for L2 learners of Spanish with L1 English, while Sorace (2006; 2016) underlines a similar finding for English-Italian late bilinguals (i.e. both attrited speakers of Italian with L2 English and L2 speakers of Italian with L1 English). As noted by many (see also Section 1 and 2.3), a similar behavior in speakers of two null subject languages and speakers of a non-null and a null subject language suggests that transfer (or attrition) might not be called into question.

Where does this over-use of overt pronouns by L2ers stem from? Sorace (2011) proposes that overt pronouns are simpler than null pronouns and that interface properties (such as topicality) are hard to compute for bilinguals which are known to have processing difficulties, and ‘shallower’ processing strategies with respect to monolinguals (Clahsen & Felser 2006). It is not clear, however, in which precise sense should overt pronouns be simpler than null pronouns, at least for L2ers with an L1 in which there are null pronouns, and in which overt pronouns are used, apparently, in the same contexts (topic shift or focalization) as in the L2. There are also signs that our L2ers are indeed able to cope with topicality: this is so in their use of pro. We will therefore turn to the differences concerning pro, leaving a more careful examination of overt pronouns to the next section.

As for the differences concerning the use of pro, we found no between group differences in topic continuity. Highly significant differences emerge instead in topic shift and Tincl contexts, and, with the caution suggested in footnote 14, in NTc contexts: here, Greek Natives use significantly more pros than Italian Natives and L2ers. We interpret this finding as follows: while in Italian pro is preferred to signal topic continuity, this preference is not so strong in Greek. At least in topic shift contexts (and NTc but, again, see footnote 14), Greek Natives use, correspondingly, less lexical DPs then Italian Natives, as we have seen.

L2ers, however, are well aware that Italian works differently from Greek, and they do not transfer the property of their L1 into their L2. This also means that these L2ers are indeed able to cope with topicality.

4.1 Anaphoric devices and the number and kind of active referents

As we have seen in the previous section, the higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers (with respect to Italian Natives as well as of Greek Natives) is particularly significant in topic continuity contexts. At the same time, however, we have seen that L2ers are able to cope with topicality since they employ pro to signal topic continuity, as Italian Natives do, so difficulties in computing topicality cannot be held responsible for their use of overt pronouns in topic continuity.

Examining the contexts in which L2ers use an overt pronoun, we noticed that there were often two active referents differing for gender and/or number. This observation could be interesting also in the light of Arnold & Griffin’s (2007) proposal that the presence of an additional character influences the kind of anaphoric device employed: through their elicited production experiments, they found that English native speakers prefer an overt pronoun when they are asked to continue a sentence containing only one referent, while lexical DPs are used more often than pronouns when two referents are introduced in the preceding discourse, even when the two antecedents mismatch in gender features.

In order to verify the observation that L2ers use overt pronouns particularly when there are two active referents differing for gender and/or number, and to see whether this was a peculiarity of L2ers, we have examined the sentences in the Reference Corpus of the three groups according to the number and kind of active discourse referents. Lambrecht (1994) considers ‘active’ those referents who are present in the short term memory. As a working definition, we consider a referent to be active when it is present in the sentence (in the form of a pronoun or a lexical DP) or explicitly mentioned in the previous one.¹⁷ As before (see Section 3), we do not consider the referents contained in a ‘parenthetical’ sentence.

We distinguished four cases: a) sentences in which only one referent is active (1r); b) sentences in which two referents matching for animacy/humanness, gender and number are active (2rno); c) sentences in which there are two active referents with an animacy mismatch (2rA); and d) sentences in which there are two referents matching for animacy/humanness, but with a mismatch in gender and/or number (2rgn).¹⁸ The distribution of the sentences in each group’s Reference Corpus according to the four conditions is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6

Referents conditions.

The four conditions are almost equally distributed among groups. As far as L2ers are concerned, we may note a lower distribution of the 2rA condition (and a higher distribution of the 1r condition), which is possibly related to the more essential style of their narrations, where reference to inanimate or non-human referents is moderate and reference to one single referent is preferred.

We then analyzed the occurrence of the different subject anaphoric devices according to the number and kind of active referents. The results are shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7

Anaphoric devices in the different referents conditions.

In the condition with one referent (1r), we observe that all groups mainly resort to pro (Italian Natives 53.91%; L2ers 61.40%; Greek Natives 64.06%) and lexical DPs (Italian Natives 42.60%; L2ers 32.45%; Greek Natives 28.12%). Overt pronouns are rarely attested (Italian Natives 0.86%; L2ers 5.26%; Greek Natives 2.08%), as well as ‘other’ (Italian Natives 2.60%; L2ers 0.87%; Greek Natives 5.72%). In the condition with two matching referents (2rno), as well, all groups mainly resort to pro (Italian Natives 50%; L2ers 53.33%; Greek Natives 58.82%) and lexical DPs (Italian Natives 37.93%; L2ers 31.11%; Greek Natives 33.33%). Overt pronouns are a bit more attested than in the preceding condition (Italian Natives 8.62%; L2ers 16.26%; Greek Natives 5.88%), while similar rates can be observed for ‘other’ (Italian Natives 3.44%; L2ers 2.22%; Greek Natives 1.96%). In the condition in which we have two referents with an animacy/humanness mismatch (2rA) we found a higher use of pro (Italian Natives 77.66%; L2ers 78.94%; Greek Natives 81.98%) and less lexical DPs (Italian Natives 17.96%; L2ers 14.73%; Greek Natives 14.33%). Overt pronouns are not particularly attested (Italian Natives 3.88%; L2ers 5.26%; Greek Natives 1.83%) as well as ‘other’ (Italian Natives 0.48%; L2ers 1.05%; Greek Natives 1.83%).

Finally, in the condition with two referents with a gender and/or number mismatch (2rgn) we have a high rate of pro (Italian Natives 67.24%; L2ers 52.58%; Greek Natives 71.20%), while lexical DPs consistently decrease (Italian Natives 12.93%; L2ers 17.24%; Greek Natives 16.80%). Overt pronouns are consistently more used in this condition (Italian Natives 14.65%; L2ers 27.58%; Greek Natives 11.20%). ‘Other’ devices are employed similarly as in the other conditions (Italian Natives 5.17%; L2ers 2.58%; Greek Natives 0.80%).

The statistical analysis reveals significant between-group differences only for what concerns overt pronouns. These between-group differences for overt pronouns, furthermore, appear to be significant only in the condition in which two referents which differ for gender and/or number are active (Kruskal-Wallis p = 0.030). A post-hoc Nemenyi test reveals that these differences reach significance when comparing L2ers and Italian Natives (p = 0.033). It appears that the use of overt pronouns when there are two active referents which differ in gender/or number is a peculiarity of L2ers, which emerges particularly with respect to Italian Natives.

In order to be sure, however, that the use of overt pronouns particularly in the 2rgn condition is a peculiarity of L2ers, we also undertook a within-group analysis. Interestingly, the analysis reveals that in all groups overt pronouns are more used when there are two active referents which differ in gender and/or number. In Italian Natives (p = 0.013) the difference reaches significance between this condition and the 1-referent condition (p = 0.017). In L2ers (p < 0.001) the difference is significant with respect to all other conditions (1-referent: p < 0.001; 2-referents no mismatch: p < 0.001; 2-referents animacy mismatch: p < 0.001). In Greek Natives, as well, the difference (p < 0.001) is significant with respect to all other conditions (1-referent: p = 0.005; 2-referents no mismatch: p = 0.004; 2-referents animacy mismatch: p = 0.004). See Figure 6 of the Appendix.

Summing up, in all groups overt pronouns are significantly more employed in the 2rgn condition, but in L2ers at a significantly higher rate with respect to the other two groups.

4.2 Overt pronouns, active referents and topic conditions

Let us now examine Tables 6, 7 and 8, in which overt pronouns in the three groups of speakers have been characterized with respect to the two conditions (and sub-conditions) examined in this study, i.e. topicality and number and kind of active referents.

Comparing the data in the three tables, we can clearly see that overt pronouns are more used in the 2rgn condition by all groups of speakers. Crucially, however, while Italian Natives and Greek Natives use them only in case of topic shift (with some exceptions which we will consider right below), L2ers do so also in case of topic continuity.

Still, they are able to cope with topicality, since, as we have seen in Section 3, they are well aware of the fact that pro in Italian (though not in Greek) is used to signal topic continuity.

This suggests that L2ers apply the strategy attested in their L2 (and their L1) according to which overt pronouns are preferably used when there are two active referents which differ for gender and/or number. In this particularly costly condition (Arnold & Griffin 2007), they fail to compute topicality, and the overt pronoun is employed in topic shift (as we see in (25), a case of switch, see Section 3) as well as in topic continuity (26):

In cases like (26), the use of overt pronouns appears qualitatively different from the native speakers’ use. A qualitative difference also emerges, in few occasions, when considering the cases in which an overt pronoun is used in case of topic continuity by the native participants, and by L2ers beyond the 2rgn condition.

In some of these cases, native speakers use the overt pronoun in topic continuity to express a contrast with respect to another referent, which has just been introduced (27), or is going to be introduced after, as shown in (28) and (29):

In very few cases, however, there is no contrast involved, and the overt pronoun is apparently used just to restate the current topic, as shown in (30) and (31) below:

This use of the overt pronoun has been noted for Italian by Cardinaletti (2004a and b, see also Frascarelli 2007), and described as a possible ongoing change in the language. The overt pronoun in these cases is analyzed as a weak pronoun (in the sense of Cardinaletti & Starke 1999) rather than as a strong pronoun. Similarly, Prentza & Tsimpli (2013) refer to an ‘emphatic’ use of the overt pronoun in topic continuity in Greek, as we have seen in Section 1.

Our data show that this use of the overt pronoun in topic continuity never occurs in the 1r condition in the native speakers’ corpora. It is possible that the presence of other intervening referents (in the pseudo-relative in (30.b) or in the event-reporting thetic sentence in (31.b)) prompts the use of an overt pronoun to restate the current topic.

Indeed, we have only one occurrence of an overt pronoun in the TC-1r condition in the natives’ corpora, specifically in the Greek Natives corpus, where contrast is involved, as shown in (32) below:

In the L2ers corpus, too, beyond the cases pertaining to the 2rgn condition, overt pronouns are used to express a contrast (33), and possibly to restate the current topic (34):

Some cases, however, seem to reveal the possibility of a different trend. The first is illustrated in (35) below, where, after two instances of pro in topic continuity (35.a and .b), we have two topic shifts in (.c and .d, realized through an ‘other’ device and a lexical DP) with a final topic continuity context (e.) in which the overt pronoun is employed:

Of course, the cognitive load is high in this context, but the output appears to be really at odds. The problem here is not only the overt pronoun in topic continuity (35.a), but the lexical DP in (35.d), which appears rather as a violation of Principle C of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981).

Another case is illustrated in (36) where the overt pronoun is used in topic continuity in the 1r condition in (36.a) and (36.c):

We might hypothesize that for this particular speaker even the parenthetical sentence (36.b) is sufficient to create a cognitively demanding situation so that an overt pronoun is used.¹⁹

Though sometimes reported as an example of near-natives’ productions in Italian (e.g. Sorace 2016: 672, ex. (1)), use of an overt pronoun in the TC-1r condition is quite rare in our L2ers corpus and, as we have seen above, never attested in the natives’ corpora (unless in the contrastive use seen in (32)), while it is possibly more common in L2ers of Italian with English as an L1 (Bellucci 2018–2019; but see Lozano 2016).

4.3 Discussion

Summing up, in this section we have seen that all groups of speakers use overt pronouns particularly when there are two active referents which differ for gender and/or number. In this context, L2ers use significantly more overt pronouns than native speakers: while native speakers use overt pronouns when topic shift is involved, L2ers use overt pronouns also in topic continuity.

At the same time, as we have seen in the previous section with respect to pro, L2ers are indeed able to compute topicality, as they employ pro mostly in topic continuity as Italian Natives do.

We may hypothesize that it is the 2rgn context that makes more difficult for L2ers to compute topicality.

Arnold & Griffin’s (2007) have shown that the presence of an additional character influences the kind of anaphoric device employed: through their elicited production experiments, they found that English native speakers prefer an overt pronoun when they are asked to continue a sentence containing only one referent, while lexical DPs are used more often than pronouns when two referents are introduced in the preceding discourse, even when the two antecedents mismatch in gender features, and so a pronoun (necessarily overt in English) would be sufficient to disambiguate between the two referents. Assuming that attention is a limited resource, Arnold & Griffin (2007) propose that the presence of an additional character decreases a referent’s activation, as an effect of cognitive load: two entities compete with each other, lowering the overall activation that each entity has in the speaker’s mind. As a result, they observe the use of over-explicit expressions (lexical DPs in English), i.e. of expressions encoding lower level of activation (Ariel 1990; 2001).

Going back to our data, if we assume, in agreement with Sorace (e.g. 2016: 8) that bilinguals’ processing resources are more taxed, it is not surprising that, in the particularly costly condition in which two referents are active, L2 speakers have difficulties in computing topicality. Decreased activation makes the topic/non-topic distinction less clear: if it is unclear which is the ‘expected’ (Calabrese 1986) antecedent, a null pronoun cannot be used to retrieve it, and only overt pronouns can be employed.

As highlighted in much current literature, and confirmed by our data, overt pronouns are used by L2ers instead of null pronouns to retrieve topical antecedents, but not the reverse. This well known asymmetry is well explained assuming that the problem is not with anaphoric devices but with referents’ activation: what appears as an ‘over-explicit’ form (i.e. an overt pronoun instead of a null pronoun), is instead the right device if a referent’s activation is lower.

With respect to this asymmetry, Lozano (2016) proposes that (advanced) L2 learners will violate pragmatic principles banning redundancy more often than pragmatic principles banning ambiguity, being more redundant than ambiguous (Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis). Our proposal is instead that they are not redundant: if a topic’s activation decreases, an overt pronoun is not redundant, but necessary.

This cannot be the whole story, however. We found indeed that L2ers use overt pronouns in TC particularly in the 2rgn condition, while we would expect them to use overt pronouns in TC also in other 2r contexts (2r no mismatch, 2r animacy mismatch): as we have seen in Table 7, however, the 2rgn context is the one in which overt pronouns are more used by L2ers.

Quite surprisingly, overt pronouns are used more frequently in the 2rgn condition also by Italian Natives (and Greek Natives), though not as topic continuing devices. If overt pronouns signal topic shift, they should be used as topic shifting devices at a comparable rate at least in all contexts with two active referents, but, as we have seen, this is not the case.²⁰

One possibility is that the 2rgn condition is the condition in which there are more topic shifts. An examination of the Italian Natives corpus in this respect reveals, however, that TS contexts are only slightly more attested in the 2rgn condition (28.37%) with respect to the other conditions (1r: 22.97%; 2rno: 22.29%; 2rA: 26.35%). So we must conclude that the 2rgn condition is the condition where overt pronouns are preferred by Italian Natives (and Greek Natives), although, as highlighted by Calabrese (1986) and Carminati (2002), an overt pronoun has a bias towards a non-topic antecedent also in case of morphological ambiguity (i.e. the 2rno, see (1) above). A possible explanation for this preference is that the competition effect is lower when the two antecedents mismatch in phi-features (Arnold & Griffin 2007) and so a pronoun is the preferred device in this condition, but not when the antecedents match and the competition effect is higher.²¹

The choice of overt pronouns by L2ers, thus, is not the choice of a ‘default’ form (Sorace 2011; 2016 a. o.), i.e. the choice of an unambiguous form that is easy to select and produce. Rather, it is the same choice that is made by native speakers (all groups of speakers prefer overt pronouns in the 2rgn condition), though at a significantly higher rate. This higher rate, in turn, is due to the possible de-activation of the topic when there are two active referents (given L2ers limited processing resources), as discussed above.

The following observations confirm that overt pronouns are not chosen by L2ers because they are easy to select. As highlighted by much relevant literature (see, among many others, Ransdell & Fischer 1987; Bialystok, Craik & Luk 2008; Schwartz & van Hell 2012 and, on bilingual children, Torregrossa, Bongartz & Tsimpli 2019), lexical retrieval might be costly for L2ers (and bilinguals in general): overt pronouns, therefore, can be thought of as less costly in this respect (Hendriks, Koster & Hoeks 2014 a. o.; but see Ryan 2015; Chini 2005 and the other studies reporting over-use of lexical DPs quoted in Section 2). Our data, however, does not support the hypothesis that, in general, our L2ers avoid lexical DPs.

As we have seen in Section 2 and Section 3, L2ers do not seem to differ from Italian Natives and Greek Natives as to the frequency of lexical DPs in the Reference Corpus (see Section 2, Figure 2 in particular). When distinguishing the contexts of occurrence of lexical DPs in terms of topicality, furthermore, L2ers behave basically like Italian Natives in their higher use of lexical DPs in topic shift contexts, when compared to Greek Natives (Section 3, and Figure 4 of the Appendix). A difference (which does not reach statistical significance with the Kruskal-Wallis test, see Section 3) can be appreciated however in topic continuity contexts, where Italian Natives in particular, but also Greek Natives, use lexical DPs at a higher rate with respect to L2ers (see Figure 5).²² We could interpret this result as suggesting that L2ers may exhibit difficulties in lexical retrieval, which are not revealed in topic shift contexts due to their awareness of the fact that in these contexts Italian, contrary to Greek, requires lexical DPs (see 3.3.1 above), and appears only in topic continuity contexts. But it is unclear whether this lesser use of lexical DPs in topic continuity is the cause, or rather a consequence of the higher use of overt pronouns by L2ers in this condition.

It seems thus that an overt pronoun in the 2rgn condition is not chosen by L2ers because they might have difficulties in lexical retrieval, but because it is the appropriate device in this condition in Italian: for native speakers this is true provided that there is a topic shift; for L2ers it could also apply in topic continuity, if topic activation decreases due to the presence of an additional character.

This in turn suggests that, despite their similarity for what concerns the parameters proposed by Ariel (1990; 2001) to characterize NP types (informativity, rigidity and attenuation), overt pronouns in Italian play a different role as accessibility markers with respect to English.

Although Arnold & Griffin’s (2007) data and our data are not directly comparable (besides a difference related to the tasks employed – picture description vs. story-telling – the most important difference is that Arnold & Griffin’s task is explicitly designed to elicit topic maintenance continuations, while we have a high number of topic shifts in our data) some general trends in the results deserve a comparison. English native speakers use overt pronouns mostly in the 1r condition, while in this condition overt pronouns are virtually absent in Italian and Greek Natives productions. Provided that there is a topic shift, the 2rgn condition is the condition where overt pronouns are more attested in Italian and Greek, while in English pronoun use decreases (though to a lesser extent than in the 2rno condition, due to a ‘gender effect’) in these contexts.²³ Overt pronouns are sufficiently explicit in these contexts in Italian and Greek, while more explicit forms (lexical DPs) are preferred in English.

This in turn might reveal, provided it can be extended to other null subject languages (and Arnold & Griffin’s results to other non-null subject languages), that this different use of the overt pronoun is possibly tied to the presence of null pronouns in null subject languages, which makes overt pronouns apt to retrieve a referent with a lower degree of activation than in non-null subject languages.

Data provided by Lozano (2016) also suggest that native speakers of Spanish use overt pronouns particularly in the same condition as our native speakers of Greek and Italian, while Hendriks, Koster & Hoecks (2014) suggest that Dutch speakers prefer lexical DPs with two active referents.