Clausal types and syntactic subjects in narratives

In this work I analyze the clausal types used in semi-spontaneous narrative productions by Italian native speakers and by L2ers of Italian with L1 Greek.The data I will be concerned with in what follows also show, as we shall see in Section 4, that while pro is overwhelmingly the most attested anaphoric device in both the natives’ corpus and the near- natives’ corpus, DRs are almost never introduced as preverbal subjects by native speakers. This fact would prima facie appear to strengthen the view that the Position of Antecedent Strategy (Carminati, 2002) cannot be the strategy governing the resolution of pro extra-sententially. In the corpora there are however, as we shall see, a number of clausal types (such as pseudo-relatives, and certain types of relatives and infinitives) that share an important property: what appears as the (direct or indirect) object or predicate of the sentence in which they are embedded or included, corresponds, in different ways according to the specific clausal type, to their subject. It is this subjects that is further taken up by pro in the following sentences