HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
where certain classes of
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
s may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of
zero 0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation such as the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, 0 also serves as a placeholder numerical digit, which works by Multiplication, multiplying digits to the left of 0 by th ...
or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages, and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null
dummy pronoun A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, inclu ...
. Pro-drop is licensed only in languages that have a positive setting of the pro-drop parameter, which allows the null element to be identified by its governor. Pro-drop is a problem when translating to a non-pro-drop language such as English, which requires the pronoun to be added, especially noticeable in
machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates ...
. Amongst other reasons, it can also pose a problem with respect to transfer errors and second language acquisition. Non-pro-drop is an
areal feature In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to ...
of many northern European languages (see
Standard Average European Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by American linguist Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features. Whorf argued that the SAE languages were characterized by a num ...
), including
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, (standard)
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
,
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
and Emilian. In contrast,
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
,
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
,
Finno-Ugric languages Finno-Ugric ( or ; ''Fenno-Ugric'') or Finno-Ugrian (''Fenno-Ugrian''), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is ...
, and
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
exhibit frequent pro-drop features. On the other hand,
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
,
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, and some
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
such as
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
and European
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
, have the ability to pro-drop any argument.


History of the term

The term "pro-drop" stems from
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...
's "Lectures on Government and Binding" from 1981 as a cluster of properties of which "
null subject In linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject (grammar), subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject. In the principles and parameters framew ...
" was one (for the occurrence of ''pro'' as a
predicate Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, o ...
rather than a subject in sentences with the copula see Moro 1997). Thus, a one-way correlation was suggested between inflectional agreement (AGR) and empty pronouns on the one hand and between no agreement and overt pronouns, on the other. In the classical version, languages which not only lack agreement morphology but also allow extensive dropping of pronouns—such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese—are not included, as is made clear in a footnote: "The principle suggested is fairly general, but does not apply to such languages as Japanese in which pronouns can be missing much more freely." (Chomsky 1981:284, fn 47). The term pro-drop is also used in other frameworks in
generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
, such as in lexical functional grammar (LFG), but in a more general sense: "Pro-drop is a widespread linguistic phenomenon in which, under certain conditions, a structural NP may be unexpressed, giving rise to a pronominal interpretation." (Bresnan 1982:384). The
empty category In linguistics, an empty category, which may also be referred to as a covert category, is an element in the study of syntax that does not have any phonological content and is therefore unpronounced.Kosta, Peter, and Krivochen, Diego Gabriel. ''Elim ...
assumed (under
government and binding theory A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
) to be present in the vacant subject position left by pro-dropping is known as ''pro'', or as " little pro" (to distinguish it from "
big PRO In generative linguistics, PRO (called "big PRO", distinct from ''pro'', "small pro" or "little pro") is a pronominal determiner phrase (DP) without phonological content. As such, it is part of the set of empty categories. The null pronoun PRO is ...
", an empty category associated with
non-finite verb A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs in ...
phrases).


Cross-linguistic variation

It has been observed that pro-drop languages are those with either rich inflection for
person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
and
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
(Persian, Polish, Portuguese, etc.) or no such inflection at all (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.), but languages that are intermediate (English, French, etc.) are non-pro-drop. While the mechanism by which overt pronouns are more "useful" in English than in Japanese is obscure, and there are exceptions to this observation, it still seems to have considerable descriptive validity. As Huang puts it, "Pro-drop is licensed to occur either where a language has full agreement, or where a language has no agreement, but not where a language has impoverished partial agreement." In pro-drop languages with a highly inflected verbal morphology, the expression of the subject pronoun is considered unnecessary because the verbal inflection indicates the person and number of the subject, thus the referent of the null subject can be inferred from the grammatical inflection on the verb. Barbosa defines these typological patterns as null-subject languages (NSL), expressing that the term itself, pro-drop, can be subcategorized into categories such as: topic (discourse) pro-drop, partial NSL (partial pro-drop) and consistent NSL (full pro-drop).


Topic pro-drop languages

In everyday speech there are instances when who or what is being referred to — namely, the topic of the sentence — can be inferred from context. Languages which permit the pronoun to be inferred from contextual information are called topic-drop (also known as discourse pro-drop) languages: thus, topic pro-drop languages allow referential pronouns to be omitted, or be phonologically null. (In contrast, languages that lack topic pro-drop as a mechanism would still require the pronoun.)These dropped pronouns can be inferred from previous discourse, from the context of the conversation, or generally shared knowledge. Among major languages, some which might be called topic pro-drop languages are
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...
, and Mandarin. Topic prominent languages like Korean, Mandarin and Japanese have structures which focus more on topics and comments as opposed to English, a subject-prominent language. It is this topic-first nature that enables the inference of omitted pronouns from discourse.


Korean

The following example from Jung (2004:719) Korean shows the omission of both pronouns in the subject and object position.


Japanese

Consider the following examples from Japanese: The words in parentheses and boldface in the English translations (''it'' in the first line; ''I'', ''you'', and ''it'' in the second) appear nowhere in the Japanese sentences but are understood from context. If nouns or pronouns were supplied, the resulting sentences would be grammatically correct but sound unnatural. Learners of Japanese as a second language, especially those whose first language is non-pro-drop like English or French, often supply personal pronouns where they are pragmatically inferable, an example of
language transfer Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature sp ...
.


Mandarin

The above-mentioned examples from Japanese are readily rendered into Mandarin: Unlike in Japanese, the inclusion of the dropped pronouns does not make the sentence sound unnatural.


Partial pro-drop languages

Languages with partial pro-drop have both agreement and referential null subjects that are restricted with respect to their distribution. These partial null-subject languages include most Balto-Slavic languages, which allow for the deletion of the subject pronoun. Colloquial and dialectal German, unlike the standard language, are also partially pro-drop; they typically allow deletion of the subject pronoun in
main clause An independent clause (or main clause) is a clause that can stand by itself as a ''simple sentence''. An independent clause contains a subject and a predicate and makes sense by itself. Independent clauses can be joined by using a semicolon or ...
s without
inversion Inversion or inversions may refer to: Arts * , a French gay magazine (1924/1925) * ''Inversion'' (artwork), a 2005 temporary sculpture in Houston, Texas * Inversion (music), a term with various meanings in music theory and musical set theory * ...
, but not otherwise. Hungarian allows deletion of both the subject and object pronouns.


Slavic languages

The following table provides examples of subject pro-drop in
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
. In each of these examples, the 3rd person masculine singular pronoun 'he' in the second sentence is inferred from context. In the East Slavic languages even the objective pronoun "его" can be omitted in the present and future tenses (both imperfect and perfective). In these languages, the missing pronoun is not inferred strictly from pragmatics, but partially indicated by the morphology of the verb (Вижу, Виждам, Widzę, Vidim, etc...). However, the past tense of both imperfective and perfective in modern East Slavic languages inflects by gender and number rather than the person due to the fact that the present tense conjugations of the copula "to be" (Russian ''быть'', Ukrainian ''бути'', Belorussian ''быць'') have practically fallen out of use. As such, the pronoun is often included in these tenses, especially in writing.


Finno-Ugric languages

In
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
, the verb inflection replaces first and second person pronouns in simple sentences, e.g. ''menen'' "I go", ''menette'' "all of you go". Pronouns are typically left in place only when they need to be inflected, e.g. ''me'' "we", ''meiltä'' "from us". There are
possessive pronoun A possessive or ktetic form ( abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict ow ...
s, but
possessive suffix In linguistics, a possessive affix (from la, affixum possessivum) is an affix (usually suffix or prefix) attached to a noun to indicate its possessor, much in the manner of possessive adjectives. Possessive affixes are found in many languages o ...
es, e.g. ''-ni'' as in ''kissani'' "my cat", are also used, as in ''Kissani söi kalan'' ("my cat ate a fish"). A peculiarity of
colloquial Finnish Colloquial or spoken Finnish () refers to the unstandardized spoken variety of the Finnish language, in contrast with the standardized form of the language (). It is used primarily in personal communication and varies somewhat between the differen ...
is that the pronoun ''me'' ("we") can be dropped if the verb is placed in the passive voice (e.g. ''haetaan'', standard "it is fetched", colloquial "we fetch"). In the
Estonian language Estonian ( ) is a Finnic language, written in the Latin script. It is the official language of Estonia and one of the official languages of the European Union, spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia and 160, ...
, a close relative of Finnish, the tendency is less clear. It generally uses explicit personal pronouns in the literary language, but these are often omitted in colloquial Estonian. Hungarian is also pro-drop, subject pronouns are used only for emphasis, as example ''(Én) mentem'' "I went", and because of the definite conjugation, object pronouns can be often elided as well; for example, the question ''(Ti) látjátok a macskát?'' "Do (you pl.) see the cat?" can be answered with just ''látjuk'' "(We) see (it)", because the definite conjugation renders the object pronoun superfluous.


Hebrew

Modern
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
, like
Biblical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of t ...
, is a "moderately" pro-drop language. In general, subject pronouns must be included in the present tense. Since Hebrew has no verb forms expressing the present tense, the present tense is formed using the present participle (somewhat like English ''I am guarding''). The participle in Hebrew, as is the case with other adjectives, declines only in grammatical gender and number (like the ''past'' tense in Russian), thus: :I (m.) guard (''ani shomer'') = :You (m.) guard (''ata shomer'') = :He guards (''hu shomer'') = :I (f.) guard (''ani shomeret'') = :We (m.) guard (''anachnu shomrim'') = Since the forms used for the present tense lack the distinction between grammatical persons, explicit pronouns must be added in the majority of cases. In contrast, the past tense and the future tense the verb form is inflected for person, number, and gender. Therefore, the verb form itself indicates sufficient information about the subject. The subject pronoun is therefore normally dropped, except in third-person. : I (m./f.) guarded (''shamarti'') = :You (m. pl.) guarded (''sh'martem'') = :I (m./f.) will guard (''eshmor'') = :You (pl./m.) will guard (''tishm'ru'') = Many nouns can take suffixes to reflect the possessor, in which case the personal pronoun is dropped. In daily modern Hebrew usage, the inflection of nouns is common only for some nouns, and in most cases, inflected possessive pronouns are used. In Hebrew, possessive pronouns are treated mostly like adjectives and follow the nouns which they modify. In biblical Hebrew, inflection of more sophisticated nouns is more common than in modern usage.


Full pro-drop languages

Full pro-drop languages, also known as consistent NSLs, are languages that are characterized by rich subject agreement morphology where subjects are freely dropped under the appropriate discourse conditions. In some contexts, pro-drop in these languages is mandatory and also occurs in contexts in which pro-drop cannot happen for partial pro-drop languages. The following languages exhibit full pro-drop in their own distinct ways.


Hindi

South Asian languages such as
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
, in general, have the ability to pro-drop any and all arguments. Hindi is a
split-ergative In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergati ...
language and when the subject of the sentence is in the ergative case (also when the sentence involves the infinitive participle, which requires the subject to be in the dative caseBhatt, Rajesh (2003). Experiencer subjects. Handout from MIT course “Structure of the Modern Indo-Aryan Languages”.), the verb of the sentence agrees in gender and number with the object of the sentence, hence making it possible to drop the object since it can be contextually inferred from the gender of the verb. In the example below, the subject is in the ergative case and the verb agrees in
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
and
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...
with the direct object.
In the example below, the subject is in the
dative case In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob ...
and the verb agrees in
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
and
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...
with the direct object.
In the example below, the subject is in the nominative case and the verb agrees in
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual number ...
,
gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most culture ...
, and also in
person A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
with the subject.


Greek

Subject pronouns are usually omitted in
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, but the verb is inflected for the person and number of the subject. Example:


Romance languages

Like their parent
Latin language Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of ...
, most
Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
s (with the notable exception of French) are categorised as pro-drop as well, though generally only in the case of subject pronouns. Unlike in Japanese, however, the missing subject pronoun is not inferred strictly from pragmatics, but partially indicated by the morphology of the verb, which inflects for person and number of the subject. Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Occitan and Romanian can
elide In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase. However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run toget ...
subject pronouns only (Portuguese sometimes elides object pronouns as well), and they often do so even when the referent has not been mentioned. This is helped by person/number
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
on the verb. The 3rd person singular and plural subject pronouns are often kept to denote and differentiate male and female subjects/genders.


Spanish

In Spanish, the verb is inflected for both person and number, thus expression of the pronoun is unnecessary because it is grammatically redundant. In the following example, the inflection on the verb ''ver,'' 'see', signals informal 2nd person singular, thus the pronoun is dropped. Similarly, from both the context and verbal morphology, the listener can infer that the second two utterances are referring to the log, so the speaker omits the pronoun that would appear in English as "it." Although Spanish is predominantly a pro-drop language, not all grammatical contexts allow for a null pronoun. There are some environments that require an overt pronoun. In contrast, there are also grammatical environments that require a null pronoun. According to the ''Real Academia Española'', the expression or elision of the subject pronoun is not random. Rather there are contexts in which an overt pronoun is abnormal, but in other cases, the overt pronoun is possible or even required. Further, the examples below illustrate how overt pronouns in Spanish are not constrained by inflectional morphology. The pronoun ''nosotros'' can be either present or absent, depending on certain discourse conditions: The third person pronouns (''él, ella, ellos'', ''ellas'') in most contexts can only refer to persons. Therefore, when referring to things (that are not people) an explicit pronoun is usually disallowed. Subject pronouns can be made explicit when used for a contrastive function or when the subject is the focus of the sentence. In the following example, the first person explicit pronoun is used to emphasize the subject. In the next sentence the explicit ''yo'', stressed that the opinion is from the speaker and not from the second person or another person. Subject pronouns can also be made explicit in order to clarify ambiguities that arise due to verb forms that are homophonous in the first person and third person. For example, in the past imperfect, conditional, and the subjunctive, the verb forms are the same for first person singular and third person singular. In these situations, using the explicit pronoun ''yo'' (1st person singular) or ''él, ella'' (3rd person singular) clarifies who the subject is, since the verbal morphology is ambiguous.


Italian

Italian further demonstrates full pro-drop by allowing for the possibility of a salient, referential, definite subject of finite clauses. With respect to the
Null subject parameter Pro-drop parameter or Null subject parameter is the parameter which determines whether a language is a pro-drop language or not. A positive setting of the parameter allows an empty pro-element to be identified by its governor. This is the case i ...
(NSP), this will be analyzed using the phrase 'She speaks Italian.' Italian has a value: :''Parla italiano''. (Italian, +NSP) A non pro-drop language, such as English, has a value for NSP and thus does not allow for that possibility: : *Speaks Italian. (English, -NSP)


Portuguese

Portuguese displays full pro-drop by allowing subjects of finite clauses to be phonetically null: Provided this example, it is important to note that variations of Portuguese can differ with respect to their pro-drop features. While European Portuguese (EP) is a full pro-drop language, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exhibits partial pro-drop. The two are compared below, respectively: Examples of omitted subject: Omission of object pronouns is likewise possible when the referent is clear, especially in colloquial or informal language: The use of the object pronoun in these examples (''aceitá-la'', ''comeu-o'') is the default everywhere but Brazil. Here ''não me achou'' would also be possible. Omission of the object pronoun is possible even when its referent has not been explicitly mentioned, so long as it can be inferred. The next example might be heard at a store; the referent (a dress) is clear to the interlocutor. In both Brazilian and European Portuguese the pronoun is omitted.


Pro-drop with locative and partitive

''Modern'' Spanish and Portuguese are also notable amongst Romance languages because they have no specific pronouns for circumstantial
complement A complement is something that completes something else. Complement may refer specifically to: The arts * Complement (music), an interval that, when added to another, spans an octave ** Aggregate complementation, the separation of pitch-clas ...
s (arguments denoting circumstance, consequence, place or manner, modifying the verb but not directly involved in the action) or
partitive In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that indicates partialness. Nominal partitives are syntactic constructions, such as "some of the children", and may be classified semantically as either set partitives or entity partitives ba ...
s (words or phrases denoting a quantity of something). However, Medieval language had them, e.g. Portuguese ''hi'' and ''ende''. Compare the following examples in which Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Romanian have null pronouns for place and partitives, but Catalan, French, Occitan, and Italian have overt pronouns for place and partitive.


Other examples


Arabic

Arabic is considered a null-subject language, as demonstrated by the following example:


Turkish

The subject "I" above is easily inferable as the verb ''gör-mek'' "to see" is conjugated in the first person simple past tense form. The object is indicated by the pronoun ''seni'' in this case. Strictly speaking, pronominal objects are generally explicitly indicated, although frequently possessive suffixes indicate the equivalent of an object in English, as in the following sentence. In this sentence, the object of the verb is actually the action of coming performed by the speaker (''geldiğimi'' "my coming"), but the object in the English sentence, "me", is indicated here by the possessive suffix ''-im'' "my" on the nominalised verb. Both pronouns can be explicitly indicated in the sentence for purposes of emphasis, as follows:


Swahili

In Swahili, both subject and object pronouns can be omitted as they are indicated by verbal prefixes.


English

English is not a pro-drop language, but subject pronouns are almost always dropped in imperative sentences (e.g., ''Come here!'' ''Do tell!'' ''Eat your vegetables!''), with the subject "you" understood or communicated non-verbally. In informal speech, the pronominal subject is sometimes dropped. The
ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...
has been called "conversational deletion" and "left-edge deletion", and is common in informal spoken English as well as certain registers of written English, notably diaries. Most commonly, it is the first person singular subject which is dropped. Some other words, especially copulas and
auxiliaries Auxiliaries are support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties such as garrison troops, ...
, can also be dropped. *''
ave you ''Alta Velocidad Española'' (''AVE'') is a service of high-speed rail in Spain operated by Renfe, the Spanish national railway company, at speeds of up to . As of December 2021, the Spanish high-speed rail network, on part of which the AVE s ...
/nowiki> ever been there?'' *'' 'm/nowiki> going shopping.
o you O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), pl ...
/nowiki> want to come?'' *'' haven't been there yet. 'mgoing later.'' *Seen on signs: '' am/We are/nowiki> out to lunch; /we will be/nowiki> back at 1:00 .M'' *''What do you think
f it F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''. His ...
/nowiki>?'' – ''I like t/nowiki>!'' (the latter only in some dialects and registers) *''
o you O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), pl ...
want a piece of cake?'' *'' ouare not!'' – '' am too!'' This pattern is also common with other tenses (e.g., ''were'', ''will'') and verbs (e.g., ''do/did'', ''have/had''). In speech, when pronouns are not dropped, they are more often reduced than other words in an utterance. Relative pronouns, provided they are not the subject, are often dropped in short restrictive clauses: ''That's the man homI saw.'' The dropping of pronouns is generally restricted to very informal speech and certain fixed expressions, and the rules for their use are complex and vary among dialects and registers. A noted instance was the "lived the dream" section of George H. W. Bush's speech at the
1988 Republican National Convention The 1988 Republican National Convention was held in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, from August 15 to August 18, 1988. It was the second time that a major party held its convention in one of the five states known as the Deep So ...
.


Other language families and linguistic regions

Among the Indo-European and
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant im ...
of India, pro-drop is the general rule though many Dravidian languages do not have overt verbal markers to indicate pronominal subjects.
Mongolic languages The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language ...
are similar in this respect to Dravidian languages, and all
Paleosiberian languages Paleosiberian (or Paleo-Siberian) languages or Paleoasian (Paleo-Asiatic) (from , "ancient") are several linguistic isolates and small families of languages spoken in parts of northeastern Siberia and the Russian Far East. They are not know ...
are rigidly pro-drop. Outside of northern Europe, most
Niger–Congo languages Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of ...
,
Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of ...
of
Southern Africa Southern Africa is the southernmost subregion of the African continent, south of the Congo and Tanzania. The physical location is the large part of Africa to the south of the extensive Congo River basin. Southern Africa is home to a number o ...
and Austronesian languages of the Western Pacific, pro-drop is the usual pattern in almost all linguistic regions of the world. In many non-pro-drop Niger–Congo or Austronesian languages, like Igbo, Samoan and Fijian, however, subject pronouns do not occur in the same position as a nominal subject and are obligatory, even when the latter is present. In more easterly Austronesian languages, like
Rapa Nui Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its nearly ...
and Hawaiian, subject pronouns are often omitted even though no other subject morphemes exist.
Pama–Nyungan languages The Pama–Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, containing 306 out of 400 Aboriginal languages in Australia. The name "Pama–Nyungan" is a merism: it derived from the two end-points of the range ...
of Australia also typically omit subject pronouns even when there is no explicit expression of the subject. Many Pama–Nyungan languages, however, have
clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
s, which often attach to nonverbal hosts to express subjects. The other languages of Northwestern Australia are all pro-drop, for all classes of pronoun. Also,
Papuan languages The Papuan languages are the non- Austronesian and non- Australian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands, by around 4 million people. It is a strictly geogr ...
of
New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...
and
Nilo-Saharan languages The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. ...
of
East Africa East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territories make up Eastern Africa: Due to the historica ...
are pro-drop. Among the
indigenous languages of the Americas Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large nu ...
, pro-drop is almost universal, as would be expected from the generally polysynthetic and head-marking character of the languages. That generally allows eliding of all object pronouns as well as subject ones. Indeed, most reports on Native American languages show that even the emphatic use of pronouns is exceptionally rare. Only a few Native American languages, mostly
language isolate Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The nu ...
s (
Haida Haida may refer to: Places * Haida, an old name for Nový Bor * Haida Gwaii, meaning "Islands of the People", formerly called the Queen Charlotte Islands * Haida Islands, a different archipelago near Bella Bella, British Columbia Ships * , a ...
, Trumai,
Wappo The Wappo ( endonym: ''Micewal'') are an indigenous people of northern California. Their traditional homelands are in Napa Valley, the south shore of Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and Russian River valley. They are distantly related to the ...
) and the
Oto-Manguean The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
family are known for normally using subject pronouns. Yahgan, a critically endangered language isolate from Tierra del Fuego, didn't have any pro-drop when it was still spoken widely in the late 19th century, when it was first described grammatically and had texts translated into English and other languages (three biblical New Testament texts: Luke, John, and Acts of the Apostles). In fact, emphatic pronouns and cross-reference pronouns on the verb commonly appeared together.


Pragmatic inference

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...
exhibits extensive dropping not only of pronouns but also of any terms (subjects, verbs, objects, etc.) pragmatically inferable, giving a very compact character to the language. Note, however, that Classical Chinese was a written language, and such word dropping is not necessarily representative of the spoken language or even of the same linguistic phenomenon.


See also

* (NSL) * (NSP) – The parameter which determines if languages are pro-drop, marking them as either positive (+) or negative (-) NSP. *; many languages such as Arabic and Hebrew lack a "to be" verb which is implicit in the subject.


References


Further reading

*Bresnan, Joan (ed.) (1982) The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. *Chomsky, Noam (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Holland: Foris Publications. Reprint. 7th Edition. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. *Graffi, Giorgio (2001) 200 Years of Syntax. A critical survey, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. *Moro, Andrea (1997) The raising of predicates. Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England. *Rizzi, Luigi (1982) Issues in Italian Syntax, Foris, Dordrecht. *Krivochen, Diego and Peter Kosta (2013) Eliminating Empty Categories. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. *Jaeggli, Osvaldo, and Ken Safir (1989) The Null Subject Parameter. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


External links


List of languages
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090406013447/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Linguistics/Languageslist.htm , date=2009-04-06 including pro-drop (PD) or non-pro-drop (NPD) status. Linguistic typology