Pro-drop language
From Freepedia
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where pronouns can be deleted when pragmatically inferable.
In everyday speech there are often instances when who or what is being referred to can be inferred from context. In a pro-drop language, the pronouns that in other languages would have those referents can be omitted, or be phonologically null. Among major languages, a clearcut case of a pro-drop language is Japanese (featuring pronoun deletion not only for subjects, but for practically all grammatical contexts). Mandarin also exhibits frequent pro-drop features.
Some languages are only partially pro-drop in that they allow deletion of the subject pronoun. These null subject languages include many Romance languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian.
Contents |
Examples
Consider the following examples from Japanese:
- Kono kēki wa oishii. Dare ga tsukutta no?
- This cake TOPIC tasty. Who SUBJECT make-PAST?
- "This cake is tasty. Who made it?"
- Shiranai. Ki ni itta?
- know-NEGATIVE. like-PAST?
- "I don't know. Do you like it?"
The pronouns in bold 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 unnatural. (Learners of Japanese as a second language, especially those whose first language is non-pro-drop like English or French, often make the mistake of supplying personal pronouns where pragmatically inferrable.)
Altaic languages like Turkish are also prodrop.
- Geldiğini gördüm.
- Coming-POSSESSIVE saw-PAST.
- I saw you/him/her/it come.
The subject pronoun "I" above is easily deductible as the verb "gör-mek" is declined in the first person simple past tense form. The object pronoun is supposed to be deduced from the context, in case where context is not clear enough, it should be supplied. For example, if one wants to make it sure that it was the person spoken to who was seen, one would say
- Senin geldiğini gördüm.
Generalizations across languages
Portuguese, Spanish, Italian 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 (Persian, Portuguese, etc.) or no such inflection (Japanese, Chinese, etc.), while languages that are intermediate (English, standard French, etc.) are non-pro-drop. While the mechanism by which overt pronouns are more "useful" in English than Japanese is obscure, and while there are exceptions to this observation, it still seems to have considerable descriptive validity.
English
English is considered a non-pro-drop language. Nonetheless, subject pronouns are almost always dropped in commands (e.g., Come here); and in informal speech, pronouns and other words, especially copulas and auxiliaries, may sometimes be dropped, especially from the beginnings of sentences:
- [Have] you ever been there? or [Have you] ever been there?
- I'm going to the store. [Do] you want to come with [me]?
- Seen on signs: [I am/We are] out to lunch; [I/we will be] back at 1:00 P.M.
- What do you think of it? - I like [it]!
Note that these elisions are generally restricted to very informal speech and certain fixed expressions, and the rules for their use are complex and vary among dialects.
Finno-Ugric languages
In Finno-Ugric languages such as 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 no possessive pronouns, but possessive suffixes, e.g. -ni as in kissani "my cat".
Impersonal constructions
In some cases (impersonal constructions), a proposition has no referent at all. Pro-drop languages deal naturally with these, whereas many non-pro-drop languages such as English and French have to fill in the syntactic gap by inserting a dummy pronoun. For example, "Rains" is not a correct sentence; a dummy "it" has to be added: It rains. (See weather verb.)
There are some languages that are not pro-drop but do not expect this syntactic gap to be filled. For example, in Esperanto, "He made the cake" would translate as Li faris la kukon (never Faris la kukon), but It rained yesterday would be Pluvis hieraŭ (not Ĝi pluvis hieraŭ).
