LINGUIST List 4.180

Sat 13 Mar 1993

Sum: Pro-drop Languages

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  • Mike Maxwell 6369, Pro-drop languages: a summary

    Message 1: Pro-drop languages: a summary

     Date: 12 Mar 1993 14:50:00 -0600Pro-drop languages: a summary
    From: Mike Maxwell 6369 <mike.maxwellsil.org>
    Subject: Pro-drop languages: a summary


    This posting summarizes the replies people to have sent to me on the question > What languages of the world are NOT null subject languages? Thanks to all those who replied. I was rather surprised at the small number of replies; perhaps that should be taken as an indication that there aren't many such languages.

    I've edited in some cases to combine msgs where the responder and I corresponded back and forth, hopefully without doing any violence to what they said. Internal comments from me are in [] with my initials (MM).

    To give background where I corresponded with someone who had posted to Linguist, on occasion I'll cite part of a message that was posted to LINGUIST.

    ------------------------------------------- Chris Culy (cculyvaxa.weeg.uiowa.edu) ...4 of the 5 W. African languages I know something about are not null subject languages: Bambara (Mande), Fula ((West) Atlantic), Moore (Gur), Songhai (Nilo-Saharan or isolate). Dogon (isolate or Gur) is a null subject language. All but Moore have large numbers of speakers in Mali, while Moore is spoken primarily in Burkina Faso.

    ------------------------------------------ Larry G. Hutchinson (hutchincs.umn.edu) Temne (Sierra Leone) requires a subject pronoun always, even if there is a nounal subject as well. There was an attempt in 1961 to treat this subject pronoun as an agreement particle, which required that all Temne pronouns, which were never observed, be obligatorily deleted after the verbs were made to agree with them. A ridiculous solution. How many years did this predate "pro-drop"? [A fascinating language. It's [-pro-drop] with a vengeance! Are there other languages like this? -MM]

    ------------------------------------------- Matthew Dryer <LINDRYERUBVMS.bitnet> Gary Gilligan completed a USC dissertation on the topic in 1987 ("A Cross-Linguistic Approach to the Pro-Drop Parameter"), based on a sample of 100 languages. Of these 100 languages, only 7 do not allow null subjects in finite clauses, and these 7 include one Indo-European language and 2 Indo-European-based Creoles. (The other four include two Niger-Congo languages, Tagalog, and Guaymi)... Gary Gilligan is no longer in the field and does not have email. [I wonder if someone would comment on Tagalog? As I understand, it's controversial whether Tagalog even HAS subjects, which may confound the question of whether it allows null subjects. -MM]

    -------------------------------------------- George Aaron Broadwell (AA2492%UOKMVSA.bitnetvmd.cso.uiuc.eduPMDFDALLAS) I've done some fieldwork on Santa Ana del Valle Zapotec, which is not a pro-drop language. Pronominal subjects cliticize to the verb, however. Some data:

    Gu-naa Juany Maria. 'Juan saw Maria.' com-see

    Gu-naa-bi Maria. 'He saw Maria.' com-see-he

    *Gu-naa-bi Juany Maria. (John he saw Maria.)

    *Gu-naa Maria (saw Maria.)

    I think the 3rd example shows that /-bi/ is a real pronoun, and not some kind of verb agreement. The 4th example shows that a subject pronoun can't be omitted.

    -------------------------------- Maria Vilkuna (mvilkunaling.helsinki.fi): [I'm afraid this gets long, but it points up the difficulty noticed in recent postings as to deciding whether a language is pro-drop -MM] The general wisdom is that Finnish drops (unstressed) 1st and 2nd person subjects, but not 3rd person ones... So, "is" Finnish a null-subject language?...

    It is quite easy to distinguish between tensed and non-tensed verbs in Finnish. [so these sentences cannot be analyzed as bare VPs in the same way as English imperatives can -MM] And 1st and 2nd person pronouns do drop from subordinated clauses, I assume equally easily as from root clauses. In the formal varieties of standard Finnish, where all this is common, 3rd person pronouns would only be omitted if coreferential with the matrix clause subject; that is, (c) below is unlikely with the 0 subject.

    (a) Kaikki luulevat, ett!a (min!a) osaan englantia. all think-3pl that (I) can-1sg English 'everybody thinks that I can speak English'

    (b) (Min!a) luulen, ett!a (min!a) osaan englantia. I think-1sg

    (c) (Min!a) luulen, ett{ h!an / *0 osaa englantia. I think-1sg that s/he /*0 can-3sg English

    (d) H!an luulee, ett{ (h!an) osaa englantia. s/he think-3sg that s/he can-3sg English

    (!a = a with two dots, !o = o with two dots)

    [The following is in reply to my question about explitive subjects; see also recent postings to the effect that a language is [-pro-drop] iff it has explitive subjects -MM] Expletives! What a fascinating topic. Officially, they don't exist. Unofficially, in colloquial speech and dialects, they abound, but they are never obligatory. Want to hear more..? In fact I wrote some preliminary observations on place-fillers in my PhD thesis, which exists, as a book, in English. (Free Word Order in Finnish, 1989)

    I'm afraid there is very little information on Finnish pro-drop available, apart from the standard wisdom concerning 1st and 2nd versus 3rd person. This is probably to be found in any reference grammar, of which the most recent ones are: Fred Karlsson 1983: Finnish Grammar, and Sulkala & Karjalainen 1992: "Finnish", in the Routledge Descriptive Grammars series. Anne Vainikka's University of Massachusetts dissertation, Deriving Syntactic Representations in Finnish (1989), is perhaps the most explicit, recognizing the formal vs. colloquial distinction, (1) versus (2) in my posting.

    Vainikka, by the way, argues against functional explanations of the 3rd/non-3rd asymmetry, although a case could be made on the basis of the non-3rd inflections being more "specific". The retreat of pro-drop in colloquial Finnish could be related to the diminishing status of agreement inflection in most dialects; cf. the present tense forms of the verb sano- 'say':

    standard Finnish colloquial Finnish (my dialect)

    1sg sano/n sano/n 2sg sano/t sano/t 3sg sano/o (vowel lengthening) sano/o 1pl sano/mme sano/taan 2pl sano/tte sano/tte 3pl sano/vat sano/o

    In most colloquial variants, the number distinction is usually not made in the 3rd person; the form used with the 1pl subject is actually identical to the impersonal passive (like "on" + verb in French).

    That agreement inflection does have some role here is shown by the common dialectal pattern I mentioned in (3), something like the following:

    ne kulki polkua pitkin. tulivat sitten yhteen taloon they walked(3sg) path along. came-3pl then one-to house-to 'they walked along the path. They came to a house'

    That is, the pronoun is much more likely to drop when the appropriate inflection appears on the verb, or vice versa. (This MIGHT be a dying dialect, though.)

    One thing that clearly must be mentioned, as it probably affects the person asymmetry (or: might be able to exist because of the asymmetry), is the extremely common use of Generic/Arbitrary 3sg null subjects. That is, patterns like the following:

    Siihen tottuu to-it gets-used(3sg) 'one gets used to it'

    Jos juo liikaa niin lihoo. if drinks(3sg) too much so gains-weight(3sg) 'If you drink too much, then you gain weight'

    Although word order facts tend to differ a bit (sorry, this is getting complicated), things would certainly get confusing if the same forms would be used for anaphoric/deictic 3rd person reference.

    What I am not able to substantiate is my claims about the "stylistic" uses of pro-drop in what have been taken to be non-pro-drop contexts. I'd like to do it, but it would take a lot of time; intuition is not enough here.

    -------------------------------- Mike Maxwell maxwella1.jaars.sil.org