Speaker subject expression with verbs of cognition – <i>think/believe</i> in Italian and Spanish

In this paper, we study 1st person subject pronoun realization with verbs of cognition in spoken Spanish and Italian corpus data. Previous studies have shown particularly frequent overt subjects with 1st person singular (yo) creo ‘(I) think/believe’ in Spanish. However, there have been no in-depth studies of the corresponding Italian structure. We thus examine whether the same patterns can be observed in these two consistent pro-drop Romance languages. The results show that Italian credo and penso ‘(I) think’ show the opposite pattern to the respective Spanish verb forms. While the Spanish verbs of cognition favor subject expression, Italian predominantly favors subject omission. We link this difference to diverging patterns of pragmaticalization: While in Spanish creo with a null and an overt subject pronoun has developed into two semi-fixed expressions with a partial functional specialization, in Italian, pragmaticalization has only targeted credo and penso with a null subject to express epistemic stance of the speaker. As evidence we focus, among other things, on subject realization with parentheticals. The results show that the pro-drop property can be exploited for pragmaticalization processes in different ways cross-linguistically.