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A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where pronouns can be deleted when they are in some sense pragmatically inferable (the precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate). The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is also commonly referred to in linguistics as zero or null anaphora.

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, Polish, and American Sign Language also exhibit 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 Catalan, Italian, Occitan, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian (French is the most notable exception).

Examples

Japanese

Consider the following examples from Japanese:

Kono kēki wa oishii. Dare ga yaita no?
This cake TOPIC tasty. Who SUBJECT made?
"This cake is tasty. Who made it?"

Shiranai. Ki ni itta?
know-NEGATIVE. liked?
"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 inferable.)

Romanic languages

Spanish, like most Romanic languages, is often categorised as pro-drop too, although only in the case of subject pronouns. Unlike Japanese, however, the missing pronoun is not inferred pragmatically; the grammatical person of the deleted subject pronoun is indicated by the morphology of the verb. Example:

¿Ves este madero? Sería bueno para la fogata. Se secó completamente.
See this log? Would be good for the campfire. Completely dried (literal, direct translation)
Do you see this log? It would be good for the campfire. It is completely dried (correct translation)

Spanish and Portuguese are also notable amongst Romanic languages because they have no pronouns which refer to circumstantial complements or partitives. Compare the following:

Slavic languages

Slavic languages behave in a similar manner as Romanic; e.g. in Croatian:

Vidim ga. Dolazi.
See-1stPERS-SING he-ACC. Come-3rdPERS-SING.
"I see him. He is coming."

Here he in the second sentence is inferred from context. It could also be she.

Altaic languages

Altaic languages like Turkish are also pro-drop.

Geldiğini gördüm.
Coming-POSSESSIVE saw.
I saw you/him/her/it come.
The subject "I" above is easily inferrable 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; 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, Catalan, Occitan and Romanian can elide subject pronouns only (Brazilian Portuguese can elide both subject and object pronouns), 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.

History of the term

The term "pro-drop" stems from Chomsky´s "Lectures on Government and Binding" from 1981 as a cluster of properties of which "null subject" was one. According to this parameter, languages like Italian and Spanish may be classified as pro-drop languages, while English and French may not. 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. It is worth noting that in the classical version, languages which not only lack agreement morphology but also allow extensive dropping of pronouns, like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and others 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, like 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)

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:

In speech, when pronouns are not completely dropped, they are often the target of more aggressive relaxed pronunciation than other words in an utterance.

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 possessive pronouns, but possessive suffixes, e.g. -ni as in kissani "my cat", are also used.

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. "*Rains" is not a correct sentence; a dummy "it" has to be added: It rains. In most Romanic languages, however, "Rains" can be a sentence: Spanish "Llueve", Italian "Piove", Catalan "plou", etc. (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).

References

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.

Bresnan, Joan (ed.), 1982, The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Linguistic typology

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Pro-drop language".

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