@article {simonenkoAgreementSyncretisationLoss2019, title = {Agreement Syncretisation and the Loss of Null Subjects : Quantificational Models for {Medieval French}, journal = {Language Variation and Change}, volume = {31}, number = {3}, year = {2019}, pages = {275{\textendash}301}, abstract = {This paper examines the nature of the dependency between the availability of null subjects and the {\textquoteleft}{\textquoteleft}richness{\textquoteright}{\textquoteright} of verbal subject agreement, known as Taraldsen{\textquoteright}s Generalisation (Adams, 1987; Rizzi, 1986; Roberts, 2014; Taraldsen, 1980). We present a corpus-based quantitative model of the syncretization of verbal subject agreement spanning the Medieval French period and evaluate two hypotheses relating agreement and null subjects: one relating the two as reflexes of the same grammatical property and a variational learning-based hypothesis whereby phonology-driven syncretization of agreement marking creates a learning bias against the null subject grammar. We show that only the latter approach has the potential to reconcile the intuition behind Taraldsen{\textquoteright}s Generalisation with the fact that it has proven nontrivial to formulate the notion of agreement richness in a way that would unequivocally predict whether a language has null subjects.}, author = {Simonenko, Alexandra and Beno{\^\i}t Crabb{\'e} and Sophie Pr{\'e}vost} }