I believe that some linguists interpret contemporary informal French as a null-subject language, mainly because the phonemic stature of French subject pronouns has diminished over time. A paper by Elly van Gelderen (The Subject Cycle: Linguistic Change and Cognitive Principles, [2007]) perhaps suggest as much. If this is the case, and as the source language of French (namely, Latin) was a null-subject language, is an unorthodox analysis of intermediate forms of French at all possible: to wit, French has never been a non-null-subject language, as English is? I in no way have the expertise to answer this question, but I do not believe that standard prescriptivist accounts of French grammar are indications in themselves of the non-null-subject state of the language. Possibly only the historical record can determine the validity of this unorthodox assertion. That is, examples of subject-less clauses within the historical corpus of unstylized, informal French might affirm the thesis, and examples of unstylized clauses wherein a free morpheme intervenes between subject pronoun and verb phrase (full syntactic configurability assumed) might disprove the thesis.

I believe that some linguists interpret contemporary informal French as a null-subject language, mainly because the phonemic stature of French subject pronouns has diminished over time. A paper by Elly van Gelderen (The Subject Cycle: Linguistic Change and Cognitive Principles, [2007]) perhaps suggests as much. If this is the case, and as the source language of French (namely, Latin) was a null-subject language, is an unorthodox analysis of intermediate forms of French at all possible: to wit, French has never been a non-null-subject language, as English is? I in no way have the expertise to answer this question, but I do not believe that standard prescriptivist accounts of French grammar are indications in themselves of the non-null-subject state of the language. Possibly only the historical record can determine the validity of this unorthodox assertion. That is, examples of subject-less clauses within the historical corpus of unstylized, informal French might affirm the thesis, and examples of unstylized clauses wherein a free morpheme intervenes between subject pronoun and verb phrase (full syntactic configurability assumed) might disprove the thesis.