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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) would be grammatical but rather unnatural in Brazil.
Here não me achou would also be possible.
"(Je ne) sais pas. – (I) don’t know. (Je) t’appellerai demain. – (I) will call you tomorrow. (Il ne) comprend rien, machin. – That guy don’t understand a thing."
This examples seems false to me (native french speaker). I never heard of such sentences. Contraction of "je" in "j'" occurs in oral colloquial speach, but not a drop.
"J'sais pas. – I don’t know.", "J't’appellerai demain" or "J'appellerai demain" (can be "I'll call you tomorrow" in context) "Comprend rien, ce con" (That idiot don’t understand a thing).
Maybe the original writer have reference for this, otherwise it's seems very wrong, even from the mouth of low class people. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.91.192.209 ( talk) 20:21, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
Totally agree with 91.91.192.209. Those examples sound so wrong. Even a very low class peron would not say that. I suppressed the mention of French language in that paragraph. It should be mentionned that in the 3rd example ((Il ne) comprend rien, machin.), it is not so clear whether the subject is dropped. "Machin" is actually the subject of "comprend", but put at the end. As if "apposed" to a ghost "il" subject for the verb. Nitsugua ( talk) 08:26, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi. 這件蛋糕很美味。 I have never heard of the classifier 件 used for 蛋糕. 塊(块) or possibly the generic 個(个) would sound much better. I'm going to change it. Hope no one objects. ( Erebos12345 ( talk) 07:56, 12 October 2009 (UTC))
My Chinese friend says that the text about Chinese is not correct. The pronouns should not be dropped in correct Chinese. To say "Not know" as an answer is considered sloppy language.-- BIL ( talk) 14:14, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to add this change:
Among major languages, Japanese and Korean are considered pro-drop languages. Japanese and Korean feature pronoun deletion not only for subjects, but for practically all grammatical contexts.
I'd also like to add Korean examples. Any objections? 211.47.122.89 ( talk) 12:12, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm a Korean Heritage speaker and Linguistics student. I noticed Korean pro-dropping, which led me here. I have no citations, but can offer an example:
English
Q: Did you eat?
A: I ate.
Korean
Q: 먹었어?
A: 먹었어
Korean text: 먹었어?
Gloss: eat[past]?
Romanized: meog-eoss-eo
Translation: did you eat?
Korean text: 먹었어.
Gloss: eat[past]
Romanized: meog-eoss-eo
Translation: I ate.
It is a minimal example showing how much can be stripped from an exchange in Korean while being grammatical and common in everyday speech.
The article says: "Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian can elide subject pronouns only". I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and we elide object pronouns as well.
In casual Brazilian Portuguese, the example given for Japanese can be translated as follows:
I can't comment on Spanish (and the other languages) because it usually has subtle differences regarding what is usual and what sounds strange.
How could the article be improved? -- Yuu en 21:35, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
-- Thanks for your reply :). I don't know much about European Portuguese. I rembember reading something saying that object pronouns are not dropped, but it could as well be that they are not dropped as often... So i cannot comment on this. --
Yuu en 20:55, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
This page seems to be committing a false dichotomy. What about languages that omit dummy pronouns, but which otherwise don't drop pronouns? For example Esperanto. -- Smjg 16:52, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've never heard this. In which lects does it appear? -- Hoary 02:57, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)
The first time I ever heard "come with" or "go with" was in NW Oregon, where I grew up, probably twenty years ago. It sounded odd then, and it sounds odd now (though it's understandable). There are a couple of issues here:
Are pro-drop traits more common in topic-prominent languages? -- Dpr 05:47, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
This connection has been most clearly suggested in Yan Huang´s "Anaphora" from 2000 (Oxford). He suggests a distinction between syntactic languages (English, German, French) and pragmatic languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese), and two of the diagnostics are topic-prominence and zero anaphora. The typology is still quite controversial and not that well known in the general linguistic community, but is definitely on to something. Grape, 26 June 2006
We now read: Spanish is pro-drop too, although only in the subject. This is usually to avoid its repetition. How is this avoidance of "repetition" different from the usual pro-drop avoidance of what can be pragmatically inferred? -- Hoary 07:08, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I've just removed the Japanese kanji/kana added to the romaji transliteration. This is only an example (not of phonetics, least of all of writing) and Japanese script here is not needed. There was a long discussion about this in the main Japanese language article, no less. The kanji/kana were also incorrect. The topic marker wa is written with the hiragana for ha, and there are common kanji for ki ni itta; however, oishii and dare I've seen more commonly spelt fully in hiragana, おいしい and だれ. Oishii in particular is one of those odd ad hoc combinations that have nothing to do with the historical readings of the kanji in question...
-- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 14:35, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
The section reads "Nonetheless, subject pronouns are almost always dropped in commands (e.g., Come here)." As these are commands, ie imperative mood, is this relevant? While English tends to use the same word form for imperative and indicative mood, as opposed to some other languages, the lack of subject is the mood marker isn't it? Even French, which as I understand is a decidedly non-prodrop language, would not require a pronoun for an imperative mood, would it? (I do not know any languages outside of Latin and English, hence why these are questions.) -- Frick898 19:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
The language survey mentions that French is an exception amongst Romance languages for not having pro-drop. This is oversimplifying, as the subjects "je", "tu", "il" etc. are now pretty much universally accepted to be affixes or clitics rather than independent (pronoun) words. Although there is a little room for argument depending on your theory of clitics/your analysis of French, there's not much reason to think that the "je" in "je mange" is any different from the "o" in Italian "mangio": both mark first person, neither is an independent pronoun. Extra evidence for this comes from the fact that (i) these clitics never appear anywhere except attached to a verb, (ii) they cannot be coordinated (*il et elle mange) and (iii) you _can_ put a genuine pronoun in subject position for stress (if only in limited situations; e.g. "lui rejette cette idée" = "HE rejects this idea"), just like in other Romance languages. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 171.64.42.67 ( talk • contribs) .
I'm not a linguist and this is my first time to deal with this term. But I think the concept of pro-drop language is non-pro-drop-language centric. As for Japanese, speakers do not delete nouns (grammatically, pronouns are just nouns) since they do not have to be presented by default. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that speakers add nouns when they are not inferable from context or speakers want to emphasize them. Is there any professional analysis from this point of view? -- Nanshu 10:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm. I have to clarify my idea. In my understanding, the distinction between noun and pronoun is not important here. Rather, the point is that Japanese does not give special grammatical status to subject and object. Maybe it has nothing to do with typological comparison but I think it goes against speakers' recognition. Here is an example.
We can create a verb-oriented structure as follows.
Subject (I) and object (a book) are obligatory and the rest is optional in English. But in Japanese, each element has equal status. All combinations of each element are grammatically correct: katta ([I] bought [it]). watashi wa katta (I bought [it]). hon wo katta ([I] bought a book). honya de katta ([I] bought [it] at the bookstore). etc. When native speakers speak these sentences, they don't recognize that they drop subject and/or object, just as English speaking people don't think they drop "last Sunday" when saying, "I bought it." -- Nanshu 23:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I have added some information about the original "pro-drop" claims made by Chomsky (1981), where Japanese was explicitly not included. I guess the page should be re-edited according to this, but I am not sure how it could best be done. Questions in linguistics concerning pronouns and anaphora are very theory-dependent, and as Ruakh says, there is much conceptual variation and lack of concensus in this area. The literature on pro-drop and zero anaphora is enormous, and rather than editors presenting their own tentative analyses, it might be an idea to include more information on the disagreement and controversies? Nanshu´s point about all elements having equal status in Japanese is another controversial topic. Most linguists would say that subjects and objects have a different status than adjuncts in any language. Just think about topicalization - if you topicalize subjects and objects, the particles are deleted (there is no "watashi ga wa" or "hon o wa"), while all other particles stay attached ("honya de wa") - a pretty clear difference. This is more abstract than what native speakers recognize that they are doing in real time conversation, though. Grape, 26 June 2006
We Brazilians normally use the subject pronoun with the verb, similar to Tuscan dialects of Italian:
Trabalhos recentes vêm apontando correlações entre esta mudança do paradigma e o uso cada vez menor de sujeitos nulos no PortuguêsBrasileiro. Destacamos o trabalho de Duarte (1993), que analisa peças de teatro populares dos séculos XIX e XX, mostrando que está ocorrendo uma mudança no PB, no sentido de não mais permitir o sujeito nulo (from the Orbilat page)
Most dialects in Brazilian Portuguese exhibit evidence of an on-going loss of the properties of the null subject (NS) parameter, namely loss of the “avoid pronoun” principle and subject verb inversion (cf. Duarte 1995). Connected with this change, there is also the loss of movement of the clitics to the pre-auxiliary position, resulting in generalized proclisis to the main verb (cf. Cyrino, 1993), with the consequence that these dialects now allow clitics in sentence initial position. The changes are attributed to the loss of the second person tu, a fact that led to the impoverishment of its inflectional system. (from the Ohio State Univ. site)
(In Brazilian Portuguese PRODROP is obligatory only with impersonal verbs: Choveu It rained; Ofenderam vocês (You [all] were offended; with direct addressing is optional: Viu? - Você viu?- Cê viu
CÊ functions as a clitic pronoun: [vo]cê entendeu? - did you understand?; and cannot be used as an object: abandonaram você [but never abandonaram cê] = you were abandoned])
further reading:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-44502001000100007
http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Portuguese-Brazilian/Studies/Subject_realization.htm
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/NWAV/Abstracts/Papr191.pdf
[Three partial pro-drop languages] http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mtb23/NSP/Anders%20et%20al%2030%20June%20abstract.doc
The loss of the 'Avoid Pronoun Principle' in Brazilian Portuguese. M.E.L. Duarte (2000)
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.131.103.29 ( talk • contribs).
One remarkable difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is related with the setting of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP). While European Portuguese (EP) behaves like a prototypical romance null subject language, contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a partially pro-drop system (Duarte 1995; Kato 2000), with preferably overt referential subjects and
null expletive subjects in finite clauses, a procedure consistent with a discourse orientation shown by BP (Kato & Duarte 2003).
source: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAV/abstracts/nwav36_cavalcante_duarte.pdf
EP favors null subjects in every structural context, ranging from 95% to 82%, whereas BP prefers overt pronouns not only in the most unfavorable contexts for null subjects – those in which the antecedent appears in a different syntactic function – but also in patterns showing co-referential subjects and syntactic adjacency, an optimal structural context for null subjects in languages which exhibit that property. The results bring support to the assumption that null subjects in the two varieties are of a different nature: a pronoun in EP and a pronominal anaphor in BP.
http://www.ucy.ac.cy/~iclave4/P.%20Barbosa,%20M.%20Duarte,%20M.%20Kato.doc
The article states that the pronoun could not be dropped from "come with" in British English, I think this should be reworded to reflect that this construction is a peculiarity of the U.S. mid-west and that most people outside that area are not familiar with it, as it is worded now it makes it sound like only the British don't use this. I've lived in the U.S my whole life, and only became aware of this phrase in the last year or so; I have yet to encounter it anywhere but in writing. I also think the statement at the end emphasizing that all of the examples are very informal should be strengthened. -- HarryHenryGebel 07:04, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
From the article:
When answering a question, the sentence structure of the question is often dropped from the answer.
I know pro-drop is a common term, but a category like pro-drop languages sounds as vague as non-click languages. As far as I know, it is non-pro-drop that is unusual among world languages, and it is a recent innovation. Do you know any non-European language that is non-pro-drop and uses dummy subjects as in it rains? - TAKASUGI Shinji ( talk) 04:56, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
If it could be of any utility, archaic and old (Galician-)Portuguese and Spanish presented a very different state of things from today. Sp. "voy" or Pt. "vou" come from "allá voy" or "lá vou" (lit. "I go there"), this kind of sentences very alive until very recently. That origin is not very different for instance of that of "j'y vais" or "hi vaig", where the "y"/"hi" come from Latin "hic" (here). In mediaeval times, Pt. also presented "vou i" (exactly the same as the rest of romance languages), I am not sure about Sp. but it cannot be very different from this. About partitive, also in the past (and dialectally today) can be traced: it is not unusual in Galicia today (but not common) to hear "como do pan", which is truly a partitive, also, "tenho quatro deles" (lit. I have four of them) or "tengo cuatro de esos" (of those) is a standard sentence, of course, you can drop it today if context does not need to clear it, but (at least in mediaeval times and in G-Pt.) was compulsory. 212.51.52.7 ( talk) 14:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't quite get the colors on the map: yellow and pink are pro-drop? I think we should have all the colors in the legend. -- Lgriot ( talk) 01:16, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
External link -- Pawyilee ( talk) 10:45, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
South Asian languages in general have the ability to pro-drop any and all arguments.
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help)Hi, I found plenty of relevant and interesting information in this entry. It would be great to add interlinear glosses for examples.
For example, the Chinese 谁考的 gets a 'literal' translation as "Who bake" with no mention of the "de" 的 (nominalizer, complementizer/relativizer?) which is in fact an important component of this example. Of course interlinear glosses can't explain everything but they provide useful pointers.
(I'm not a specialist of the topic; I do a lot of interlinear glossing on languages I work on, but for Standard Mandarin Chinese, I have no experience and wouldn't want to butt in without knowing common practice.)
-- AlexisMichaud ( talk) 08:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
Was the second-person singular pronoun ′thou' dropped more often, especially when used with ′-st′ form of second-person singular verbs? I remembered this being done often in the novel 'Kim' by Rudyard Kipling, but when I actually looked it up, I could find only one instance:
″Thou leanest on me in the body, Holy One, but I lean on thee for some other things. Dost know it?″
So is this an isolated exception or was this form more common historically? SundaLives 14:19, 2 January 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SundaLives ( talk • contribs)
Proponents of the term "pro-drop" take the view that pronouns which in other languages would have those referents can be omitted, or be phonologically null.
This unclear and convoluted sentence makes it sound like a disagreement among factions of linguists over whether certain pronouns are allowed to be dropped in certain languages.
But in reality, I suspect all parties agree on which exemplary sentences are correct, but only disagree on the deeper structures that are to be inferred or the descriptive language to use.
If they disagree about anything. The sentence suggests that there is a controversy about the term, when probably there is none. In any case it is not explained. 84.227.228.178 ( talk) 12:22, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
Dropping is used all the time in English. It's probably started with postcards, being brief, and it's popularised in songs:
"(so/just)Feel it in the one-drop, And we'll still find time to rap." And, no, that's not an Imperative, is it now? Get it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stjohn1970 ( talk • contribs) 15:10, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
It's not used all the time, please, mention pro-drop that occurs all the time with she/he/we/you/they to demonstrate what you say.
Please explain: "including French, (standard)", When non-standard French could be pro-drop, I don't get it, and I cannot find any examples. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.91.51.235 ( talk) 13:11, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
Why is Latin not used as a prime example of pro-drop? E.g., sum abbas [normal], ego sum abbas [emphatic]; dicite [imperative, unique]? I know it's not a 'live' modern language (tho it is lingua franca for some), but it is well-known to many English-speakers with even the beginning of a classical education (or perhaps I'm very old-fashioned, as Peter Cook would say. And its rules are so well-defined and fixed!
We will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page focused on Full Pro-Drop. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article. S Senghera ( talk) 08:47, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Under the Portuguese section, it says "While European Portuguese (EP) is a full pro-drop language, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exhibits partial pro-drop. The two are compared below, respectively:", but as far as I can tell, the subsequent example ("Examples of omitted subject:") doesn't seem to demonstrate the full vs. partial pro-drop contrast, as both sentences seem to match 1-to-1 in terms of pro-drop. Could we add or replace it with a better example? SirLurksalot ( talk) 10:51, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Elephantbanter.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 07:13, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
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) would be grammatical but rather unnatural in Brazil.
Here não me achou would also be possible.
"(Je ne) sais pas. – (I) don’t know. (Je) t’appellerai demain. – (I) will call you tomorrow. (Il ne) comprend rien, machin. – That guy don’t understand a thing."
This examples seems false to me (native french speaker). I never heard of such sentences. Contraction of "je" in "j'" occurs in oral colloquial speach, but not a drop.
"J'sais pas. – I don’t know.", "J't’appellerai demain" or "J'appellerai demain" (can be "I'll call you tomorrow" in context) "Comprend rien, ce con" (That idiot don’t understand a thing).
Maybe the original writer have reference for this, otherwise it's seems very wrong, even from the mouth of low class people. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.91.192.209 ( talk) 20:21, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
Totally agree with 91.91.192.209. Those examples sound so wrong. Even a very low class peron would not say that. I suppressed the mention of French language in that paragraph. It should be mentionned that in the 3rd example ((Il ne) comprend rien, machin.), it is not so clear whether the subject is dropped. "Machin" is actually the subject of "comprend", but put at the end. As if "apposed" to a ghost "il" subject for the verb. Nitsugua ( talk) 08:26, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
Hi. 這件蛋糕很美味。 I have never heard of the classifier 件 used for 蛋糕. 塊(块) or possibly the generic 個(个) would sound much better. I'm going to change it. Hope no one objects. ( Erebos12345 ( talk) 07:56, 12 October 2009 (UTC))
My Chinese friend says that the text about Chinese is not correct. The pronouns should not be dropped in correct Chinese. To say "Not know" as an answer is considered sloppy language.-- BIL ( talk) 14:14, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to add this change:
Among major languages, Japanese and Korean are considered pro-drop languages. Japanese and Korean feature pronoun deletion not only for subjects, but for practically all grammatical contexts.
I'd also like to add Korean examples. Any objections? 211.47.122.89 ( talk) 12:12, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm a Korean Heritage speaker and Linguistics student. I noticed Korean pro-dropping, which led me here. I have no citations, but can offer an example:
English
Q: Did you eat?
A: I ate.
Korean
Q: 먹었어?
A: 먹었어
Korean text: 먹었어?
Gloss: eat[past]?
Romanized: meog-eoss-eo
Translation: did you eat?
Korean text: 먹었어.
Gloss: eat[past]
Romanized: meog-eoss-eo
Translation: I ate.
It is a minimal example showing how much can be stripped from an exchange in Korean while being grammatical and common in everyday speech.
The article says: "Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Romanian can elide subject pronouns only". I'm a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, and we elide object pronouns as well.
In casual Brazilian Portuguese, the example given for Japanese can be translated as follows:
I can't comment on Spanish (and the other languages) because it usually has subtle differences regarding what is usual and what sounds strange.
How could the article be improved? -- Yuu en 21:35, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
-- Thanks for your reply :). I don't know much about European Portuguese. I rembember reading something saying that object pronouns are not dropped, but it could as well be that they are not dropped as often... So i cannot comment on this. --
Yuu en 20:55, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
This page seems to be committing a false dichotomy. What about languages that omit dummy pronouns, but which otherwise don't drop pronouns? For example Esperanto. -- Smjg 16:52, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've never heard this. In which lects does it appear? -- Hoary 02:57, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)
The first time I ever heard "come with" or "go with" was in NW Oregon, where I grew up, probably twenty years ago. It sounded odd then, and it sounds odd now (though it's understandable). There are a couple of issues here:
Are pro-drop traits more common in topic-prominent languages? -- Dpr 05:47, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
This connection has been most clearly suggested in Yan Huang´s "Anaphora" from 2000 (Oxford). He suggests a distinction between syntactic languages (English, German, French) and pragmatic languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese), and two of the diagnostics are topic-prominence and zero anaphora. The typology is still quite controversial and not that well known in the general linguistic community, but is definitely on to something. Grape, 26 June 2006
We now read: Spanish is pro-drop too, although only in the subject. This is usually to avoid its repetition. How is this avoidance of "repetition" different from the usual pro-drop avoidance of what can be pragmatically inferred? -- Hoary 07:08, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I've just removed the Japanese kanji/kana added to the romaji transliteration. This is only an example (not of phonetics, least of all of writing) and Japanese script here is not needed. There was a long discussion about this in the main Japanese language article, no less. The kanji/kana were also incorrect. The topic marker wa is written with the hiragana for ha, and there are common kanji for ki ni itta; however, oishii and dare I've seen more commonly spelt fully in hiragana, おいしい and だれ. Oishii in particular is one of those odd ad hoc combinations that have nothing to do with the historical readings of the kanji in question...
-- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 14:35, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
The section reads "Nonetheless, subject pronouns are almost always dropped in commands (e.g., Come here)." As these are commands, ie imperative mood, is this relevant? While English tends to use the same word form for imperative and indicative mood, as opposed to some other languages, the lack of subject is the mood marker isn't it? Even French, which as I understand is a decidedly non-prodrop language, would not require a pronoun for an imperative mood, would it? (I do not know any languages outside of Latin and English, hence why these are questions.) -- Frick898 19:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
The language survey mentions that French is an exception amongst Romance languages for not having pro-drop. This is oversimplifying, as the subjects "je", "tu", "il" etc. are now pretty much universally accepted to be affixes or clitics rather than independent (pronoun) words. Although there is a little room for argument depending on your theory of clitics/your analysis of French, there's not much reason to think that the "je" in "je mange" is any different from the "o" in Italian "mangio": both mark first person, neither is an independent pronoun. Extra evidence for this comes from the fact that (i) these clitics never appear anywhere except attached to a verb, (ii) they cannot be coordinated (*il et elle mange) and (iii) you _can_ put a genuine pronoun in subject position for stress (if only in limited situations; e.g. "lui rejette cette idée" = "HE rejects this idea"), just like in other Romance languages. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 171.64.42.67 ( talk • contribs) .
I'm not a linguist and this is my first time to deal with this term. But I think the concept of pro-drop language is non-pro-drop-language centric. As for Japanese, speakers do not delete nouns (grammatically, pronouns are just nouns) since they do not have to be presented by default. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that speakers add nouns when they are not inferable from context or speakers want to emphasize them. Is there any professional analysis from this point of view? -- Nanshu 10:51, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm. I have to clarify my idea. In my understanding, the distinction between noun and pronoun is not important here. Rather, the point is that Japanese does not give special grammatical status to subject and object. Maybe it has nothing to do with typological comparison but I think it goes against speakers' recognition. Here is an example.
We can create a verb-oriented structure as follows.
Subject (I) and object (a book) are obligatory and the rest is optional in English. But in Japanese, each element has equal status. All combinations of each element are grammatically correct: katta ([I] bought [it]). watashi wa katta (I bought [it]). hon wo katta ([I] bought a book). honya de katta ([I] bought [it] at the bookstore). etc. When native speakers speak these sentences, they don't recognize that they drop subject and/or object, just as English speaking people don't think they drop "last Sunday" when saying, "I bought it." -- Nanshu 23:47, 1 March 2006 (UTC)
I have added some information about the original "pro-drop" claims made by Chomsky (1981), where Japanese was explicitly not included. I guess the page should be re-edited according to this, but I am not sure how it could best be done. Questions in linguistics concerning pronouns and anaphora are very theory-dependent, and as Ruakh says, there is much conceptual variation and lack of concensus in this area. The literature on pro-drop and zero anaphora is enormous, and rather than editors presenting their own tentative analyses, it might be an idea to include more information on the disagreement and controversies? Nanshu´s point about all elements having equal status in Japanese is another controversial topic. Most linguists would say that subjects and objects have a different status than adjuncts in any language. Just think about topicalization - if you topicalize subjects and objects, the particles are deleted (there is no "watashi ga wa" or "hon o wa"), while all other particles stay attached ("honya de wa") - a pretty clear difference. This is more abstract than what native speakers recognize that they are doing in real time conversation, though. Grape, 26 June 2006
We Brazilians normally use the subject pronoun with the verb, similar to Tuscan dialects of Italian:
Trabalhos recentes vêm apontando correlações entre esta mudança do paradigma e o uso cada vez menor de sujeitos nulos no PortuguêsBrasileiro. Destacamos o trabalho de Duarte (1993), que analisa peças de teatro populares dos séculos XIX e XX, mostrando que está ocorrendo uma mudança no PB, no sentido de não mais permitir o sujeito nulo (from the Orbilat page)
Most dialects in Brazilian Portuguese exhibit evidence of an on-going loss of the properties of the null subject (NS) parameter, namely loss of the “avoid pronoun” principle and subject verb inversion (cf. Duarte 1995). Connected with this change, there is also the loss of movement of the clitics to the pre-auxiliary position, resulting in generalized proclisis to the main verb (cf. Cyrino, 1993), with the consequence that these dialects now allow clitics in sentence initial position. The changes are attributed to the loss of the second person tu, a fact that led to the impoverishment of its inflectional system. (from the Ohio State Univ. site)
(In Brazilian Portuguese PRODROP is obligatory only with impersonal verbs: Choveu It rained; Ofenderam vocês (You [all] were offended; with direct addressing is optional: Viu? - Você viu?- Cê viu
CÊ functions as a clitic pronoun: [vo]cê entendeu? - did you understand?; and cannot be used as an object: abandonaram você [but never abandonaram cê] = you were abandoned])
further reading:
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-44502001000100007
http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Portuguese-Brazilian/Studies/Subject_realization.htm
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/NWAV/Abstracts/Papr191.pdf
[Three partial pro-drop languages] http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/mtb23/NSP/Anders%20et%20al%2030%20June%20abstract.doc
The loss of the 'Avoid Pronoun Principle' in Brazilian Portuguese. M.E.L. Duarte (2000)
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 83.131.103.29 ( talk • contribs).
One remarkable difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese is related with the setting of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP). While European Portuguese (EP) behaves like a prototypical romance null subject language, contemporary Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a partially pro-drop system (Duarte 1995; Kato 2000), with preferably overt referential subjects and
null expletive subjects in finite clauses, a procedure consistent with a discourse orientation shown by BP (Kato & Duarte 2003).
source: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/NWAV/abstracts/nwav36_cavalcante_duarte.pdf
EP favors null subjects in every structural context, ranging from 95% to 82%, whereas BP prefers overt pronouns not only in the most unfavorable contexts for null subjects – those in which the antecedent appears in a different syntactic function – but also in patterns showing co-referential subjects and syntactic adjacency, an optimal structural context for null subjects in languages which exhibit that property. The results bring support to the assumption that null subjects in the two varieties are of a different nature: a pronoun in EP and a pronominal anaphor in BP.
http://www.ucy.ac.cy/~iclave4/P.%20Barbosa,%20M.%20Duarte,%20M.%20Kato.doc
The article states that the pronoun could not be dropped from "come with" in British English, I think this should be reworded to reflect that this construction is a peculiarity of the U.S. mid-west and that most people outside that area are not familiar with it, as it is worded now it makes it sound like only the British don't use this. I've lived in the U.S my whole life, and only became aware of this phrase in the last year or so; I have yet to encounter it anywhere but in writing. I also think the statement at the end emphasizing that all of the examples are very informal should be strengthened. -- HarryHenryGebel 07:04, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
From the article:
When answering a question, the sentence structure of the question is often dropped from the answer.
I know pro-drop is a common term, but a category like pro-drop languages sounds as vague as non-click languages. As far as I know, it is non-pro-drop that is unusual among world languages, and it is a recent innovation. Do you know any non-European language that is non-pro-drop and uses dummy subjects as in it rains? - TAKASUGI Shinji ( talk) 04:56, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
If it could be of any utility, archaic and old (Galician-)Portuguese and Spanish presented a very different state of things from today. Sp. "voy" or Pt. "vou" come from "allá voy" or "lá vou" (lit. "I go there"), this kind of sentences very alive until very recently. That origin is not very different for instance of that of "j'y vais" or "hi vaig", where the "y"/"hi" come from Latin "hic" (here). In mediaeval times, Pt. also presented "vou i" (exactly the same as the rest of romance languages), I am not sure about Sp. but it cannot be very different from this. About partitive, also in the past (and dialectally today) can be traced: it is not unusual in Galicia today (but not common) to hear "como do pan", which is truly a partitive, also, "tenho quatro deles" (lit. I have four of them) or "tengo cuatro de esos" (of those) is a standard sentence, of course, you can drop it today if context does not need to clear it, but (at least in mediaeval times and in G-Pt.) was compulsory. 212.51.52.7 ( talk) 14:12, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't quite get the colors on the map: yellow and pink are pro-drop? I think we should have all the colors in the legend. -- Lgriot ( talk) 01:16, 16 July 2010 (UTC)
External link -- Pawyilee ( talk) 10:45, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
South Asian languages in general have the ability to pro-drop any and all arguments.
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help)Hi, I found plenty of relevant and interesting information in this entry. It would be great to add interlinear glosses for examples.
For example, the Chinese 谁考的 gets a 'literal' translation as "Who bake" with no mention of the "de" 的 (nominalizer, complementizer/relativizer?) which is in fact an important component of this example. Of course interlinear glosses can't explain everything but they provide useful pointers.
(I'm not a specialist of the topic; I do a lot of interlinear glossing on languages I work on, but for Standard Mandarin Chinese, I have no experience and wouldn't want to butt in without knowing common practice.)
-- AlexisMichaud ( talk) 08:35, 14 June 2013 (UTC)
Was the second-person singular pronoun ′thou' dropped more often, especially when used with ′-st′ form of second-person singular verbs? I remembered this being done often in the novel 'Kim' by Rudyard Kipling, but when I actually looked it up, I could find only one instance:
″Thou leanest on me in the body, Holy One, but I lean on thee for some other things. Dost know it?″
So is this an isolated exception or was this form more common historically? SundaLives 14:19, 2 January 2014 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SundaLives ( talk • contribs)
Proponents of the term "pro-drop" take the view that pronouns which in other languages would have those referents can be omitted, or be phonologically null.
This unclear and convoluted sentence makes it sound like a disagreement among factions of linguists over whether certain pronouns are allowed to be dropped in certain languages.
But in reality, I suspect all parties agree on which exemplary sentences are correct, but only disagree on the deeper structures that are to be inferred or the descriptive language to use.
If they disagree about anything. The sentence suggests that there is a controversy about the term, when probably there is none. In any case it is not explained. 84.227.228.178 ( talk) 12:22, 28 September 2014 (UTC)
Dropping is used all the time in English. It's probably started with postcards, being brief, and it's popularised in songs:
"(so/just)Feel it in the one-drop, And we'll still find time to rap." And, no, that's not an Imperative, is it now? Get it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stjohn1970 ( talk • contribs) 15:10, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
It's not used all the time, please, mention pro-drop that occurs all the time with she/he/we/you/they to demonstrate what you say.
Please explain: "including French, (standard)", When non-standard French could be pro-drop, I don't get it, and I cannot find any examples. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.91.51.235 ( talk) 13:11, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
Why is Latin not used as a prime example of pro-drop? E.g., sum abbas [normal], ego sum abbas [emphatic]; dicite [imperative, unique]? I know it's not a 'live' modern language (tho it is lingua franca for some), but it is well-known to many English-speakers with even the beginning of a classical education (or perhaps I'm very old-fashioned, as Peter Cook would say. And its rules are so well-defined and fixed!
We will be providing structural edits and adding new content to this page focused on Full Pro-Drop. This is part of a course-based activity of a 3rd year syntax course, and we anticipate having completed our edits by the end of December. We would appreciate any and all constructive comments and suggestions about how to improve the overall quality of this article. S Senghera ( talk) 08:47, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Under the Portuguese section, it says "While European Portuguese (EP) is a full pro-drop language, Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exhibits partial pro-drop. The two are compared below, respectively:", but as far as I can tell, the subsequent example ("Examples of omitted subject:") doesn't seem to demonstrate the full vs. partial pro-drop contrast, as both sentences seem to match 1-to-1 in terms of pro-drop. Could we add or replace it with a better example? SirLurksalot ( talk) 10:51, 20 March 2024 (UTC)