Alfonso Reyes,el brasil y la lengua portuguesa

This study analyzes the incidence of noun, pronoun, and null subjects with ambiguous, potentially ambiguous, and unambiguous verb forms in prose texts by Villehardouin, Froissart, and Commynes to test the role of verbal ambiguity in the rise of subject pronouns to obligatory status in French.

The finding that a higher percentage of subject pronouns occurs with unambiguous verb forms than with ambiguous ones appears to refute the role of verbal ambiguity, yet a further test of the degree of ambiguity shows that subject pronouns occur at a higher rate when a higher degree of ambiguity is present in the verb paradigm. This could mean that the ambiguity present in the paradigm causes writers to increase the rate of subject pronouns for the entire paradigm regardless of the ambiguity of individual verb forms, or it could mean that another factor, such as verb tense, is at work. The fact that subject pronouns occur at a far lower rate with the passé simple (31%) than with four other tenses (62%-82%) suggests at the very least that verb tense plays a role in subject expression and that multiple factors, rather than verbal ambiguity alone, must be considered in accounting for subject expression in Old and Middle French.