This book offers the most comprehensive examination to date of referential null subjects in the history of English. It empirically examines the occurrence of subjectless finite clauses in more than 500 early English texts, spanning nearly 850 years, and re-evaluates previous claims concerning their distribution.

Kristian A. Rusten is Associate Professor of English Language at the Department of Language, Literature, Mathematics and Interpreting, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He was awarded his PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Bergen in 2016. His research interests include historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, quantitative methods and statistical analysis, and syntax. He has published in Transactions of the Philological Society and English Studies and, together with colleagues, in English Language and Linguistics and Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

• 1: Introduction


• 2: Referential null subjects in Old English


• 3: Do Anglian dialects of Old English have a partial pro-drop property?


• 4: The morphosyntactic characteristic of null subjects in Old English


• 5: What could have sanctioned null subjects in Old English?


• 6: The long-term diachrony of referential null subjects in early English


• 7: Conclusions