Pro-drop language


A pro-drop language is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they are pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is also commonly referred to as zero or null anaphora. In the case of pro-drop languages, null anaphora refers to the fact that the null position has referential properties, meaning it is not a null dummy pronoun. Pro-drop is only licensed in languages that have a positive setting of the pro-drop parameter, which allows the null element to be identified by its governor. 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.
Even though in everyday speech there are instances when who or what is being referred to can be inferred from context, non-pro-drop languages still require the pronoun. However, pro-drop languages allow those referential pronouns to be omitted, or be phonologically null. Among major languages, two which might be called pro-drop languages are Japanese and Korean. Chinese, Slavic languages,, American Sign Language and Vietnamese also exhibit frequent pro-drop features. In contrast, non-pro-drop is an areal feature of many northern European languages, including French, German, English and Emilian.
All languages might be considered only partially pro-drop in that they allow deletion of the subject pronoun. These null-subject languages include most Romance languages as well as all the Balto-Slavic languages and to a limited extent Icelandic. Colloquial and dialectal German, unlike the standard language, are also partially pro-drop; they typically allow deletion of the subject pronoun in main clauses without inversion, but not otherwise. Hungarian allows deletion of both the subject and object pronouns.

History of the term

The term "pro-drop" stems from Noam Chomsky's "Lectures on Government and Binding" from 1981 as a cluster of properties of which "null subject" was one.
Thus, a one-way correlation was suggested between inflectional agreement 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.".
The term pro-drop is also used in other frameworks in generative grammar, such as in lexical functional grammar, 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.".
The empty category assumed to be present in the vacant subject position left by pro-dropping is known as pro, or as "little pro".

Examples

Japanese

Consider the following examples from Japanese:
The words in bold in the English translations 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.

Chinese

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

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, 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. Nonetheless, subject pronouns are almost always dropped in imperative sentences, with the subject "you" understood.
In informal speech, the pronominal subject is sometimes dropped. This ellipsis 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, can also be dropped.
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 I 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.

Null-subject languages

Modern Greek

Subject pronouns are usually omitted in modern Greek. Example:

Romance languages

Most Romance languages are often categorised as pro-drop too, most of them 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

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 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, while in other cases the overt pronoun is possible or even required.
The third person pronouns in most contexts can only refer to persons. Therefore, when referring to things 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.

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 or él, ella clarifies who the subject is, since the verbal morphology is ambiguous.

Italian

Portuguese

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 would be grammatical but rather unnatural, especially in 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 is clear to the interlocutor. In both Brazilian and European Portuguese the pronoun is omitted.
Modern Spanish and Portuguese are also notable amongst Romance languages because they have no specific pronouns for circumstantial complements or partitives. 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.
Circumstantial complement denoting place
Partitive denoting quantity
All Slavic languages behave in a similar manner to the Romance pro-drop languages. Example:
Here 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. As with the Romance languages mentioned above, the missing pronoun is not inferred strictly from pragmatics, but partially indicated by the morphology of the verb. 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" have practically fallen out of use. As such, the pronoun is often included in these tenses, especially in writing.

Finno-Ugric languages

In Finnish, 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 pronouns, but possessive suffixes, e.g. -ni as in kissani "my cat", are also used, as in Kissani söi kalan. A peculiarity of colloquial Finnish is that the pronoun me can be dropped if the verb is placed in the passive voice. In the Estonian language, 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 mentem "I went", and because of the definite conjugation, object pronouns can be often elided as well; for example, the question láttad a macskát? "Did see the cat?" can be answered with just láttam " saw ", because the definite conjugation renders the object pronoun superfluous.

Hebrew

Modern Hebrew, like Biblical Hebrew, 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. The participle in Hebrew, as is the case with other adjectives, declines only in grammatical gender and number, thus:
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.
Many nouns can take suffixes to reflect the possessor, in which case the personal pronoun is dropped. In daily modern Hebrew usage, inflection of nouns is common only for simple 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.

Generalizations across languages

Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Occitan and Romanian can elide subject pronouns only, and they often do so even when the referent has not been mentioned. This is helped by person/number inflection on the verb. It has been observed that pro-drop languages are those with either rich inflection for person and number or no such inflection at all, but languages that are intermediate 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."

Other language families and linguistic regions

Among the Indo-European and Dravidian languages of India, pro-drop is the general rule though many Dravidian languages do not have overt verbal markers to indicate pronominal subjects. Mongolic languages are similar in this respect to Dravidian languages, and all Paleosiberian languages are rigidly pro-drop.
Outside of northern Europe, most Niger–Congo languages, Khoisan languages of Southern Africa 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 and Hawaiian, subject pronouns are often omitted even though no other subject morphemes exist. Pama–Nyungan languages of Australia also typically omit subject pronouns even when there is no explicit expression of the subject.
Many Pama–Nyungan languages, however, have clitics, 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 of New Guinea and Nilo-Saharan languages of East Africa are pro-drop.
Among the indigenous languages of the Americas, 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 isolates and the Oto-Manguean family are known for normally using subject pronouns.

Pragmatic inference

exhibits extensive dropping not only of pronouns but also of any terms 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.