Pro-drop Languages

Spanish is a pronoun-dropping language. French is not. That's interesting to me. I suppose this is because in the spoken language it would be difficult to identify the subject without a pronoun-just like in English.

Je parle
I speak
Tu parles
You speak

In both languages the verbs sound alike ("s" is silent in the French example).

Slavic languages, Japanese, Greek (possibly, I don't know it well yet), and most romance languages I can think of off the top of my head like Portuguese, Italian and Romanian also drop pronouns.

What pro-drop languages do you know? Are they throughly pro-drop?
English drops the pronoun in commmands.

The identification of the subject can be easier in a pro-drop language like Spanish than in English. The subject in Spanish can be easily identified looking at the suffixes added to the verb to conjugate it , so that the subject is present or not in the sentence is a question of redundancy. An example to illustrate this :

"Vosotros coméis". Both vosotros and coméis (-éis) carry the information of which the subject is (vosotros). On the other hand in the English sentence "You eat", one cannot assure if the subject is singular or plural.

<< English drops the pronoun in commmands. >>
-- Toutes les langues le font, je présume.
Exception: l'allemand, avec la forme de courtoisie:
- "Steh auf!"
- "Steh(e)t auf!"
- "Stehen SIE auf! Folgen SIE mir! Hören SIE mich! Erzählen SIE mir bitte keinen Quatsch!"

L'anglais omet plus facilement le pronom que le français:
"Been there. Didn't dig it"
Difficilement traduisible tel quel en français:
"J'ai été là. Pas aimé." (Il faut commencer sur le pronom)

Dans le langage courriel on dit toutefois: "Bien reçu ton message. Ai adoré ta photo!"

En espagnol et italien (possiblement aussi en portugais et catalan), 'io'/'yo' remplace en 2 lettres l'expression française "moi, je", ou le suédois "för min del, jag..." ou l'anglais "me, as far as I'am concerned, I..."

In normal semi-formal Russian pronouns are generally retained even though you could identify perfectly who's doing what without them.

Toutes les langues le font, je présume.-Parisien


That is a real question for me. Do they all do it?

Brazilian Portuguese is not a pro drop language, while Continental Portuguese is.


''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


Null subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese.
Pilar Barbosa, Maria Eugenia L. Duarte & Mary Aizawa Kato

'' The paper provides a comparative analysis of the distribution of overt vs. null subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese. Quantitative and qualitative evidence comes from a variable rule analysis based on contemporary newspaper signed articles and news. The results attest the actuation and the embedding of the ongoing change affecting the null subject property in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), already shown in speech-based studies (see Duarte 2000, 2004) and in a study based on newspaper interviews (Barbosa, Duarte & Kato 2005), comparing both varieties. Contrary to what is found for BP, European Portuguese (EP) exhibits a prototypical behavior of a null subject language. Two major conditions contribute to distinguish the distribution of overt and null pronouns: animacy and position of the antecedent of the subject. As for the first factor, the results are striking: with [-animate] referents, EP shows 91% of null pronouns, whereas in BP 61% of the [-animate] subjects are null, an impressive rate for written language. As for the second factor group, 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

A Portuguese person normally says: Amo, gosto, vou,
a Brazilian person normally says: eu amo, eu gosto, eu vou,
for (I love, I like, I go)...

For example:


eu amava = I loved
você amava = you loved
ele amava = he loved
a gente amava = we loved
vocês amavam = you (all) loved
eles amavam = they loved

in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, not many verbal forms are used,
AMAVA can mean I loved, you loved, he loved, we loved
AMAVAM can mean you (all) loved, they loved

that's why Subject Pronoun is almost always used.
Only in direct answer, it is optional:

Ele amava ela? = Did he love her?
(Ele) amava. = Yes, he did.

As PARISIEN showed, when speaking informally in English, the pronoun "I" is often omitted in statements. This is not so for other pronouns. In questions, you'll often find people omitting the pronoun "you". For instance, it is very common for people to say "Want it?" instead of "Do you want it?"

''the pronoun "I" is often omitted in statements.''

People also say: Me likes instead of I like

Thank-you, Milton. I appreciate your comments on Continental vs. Brazilian Portuguese.

<<Spanish is a pronoun-dropping language. French is not. That's interesting to me. I suppose this is because in the spoken language it would be difficult to identify the subject without a pronoun-just like in English.>>


Spanish and all other Romance langugues are null-subject, like latin.

French is the exception because it lost most verb conjugations, so the subject became necessary for clarity.

In this respect, french is the furthest removed from latin grammar, and the most simplified of the romance family, beacause it is only a moderately declined language.

Baltic (Lithuanian and probably Latvian) are also pro-drop.

It is possible to omit pronoun which is the subject of a Lithuanian sentence in most cases because verbs have inflexions (typical Indo-European). A few examples:

Kur [tu] eini?
Where are you going?

[Mes] grisime apie penkta valanda.
We will return at about five o'clock.

A unique feature of the Baltic languages is the loss of the -t- and -nt- formants for third person singular and third person plural (and also, dual). Because of this, third person personal pronouns are not so readily omitted.

Leaving things out is more extensive, though. You can also omit the so-called verbal copula in these examples:

A. Sabonis - krepsininkas.
A. Sabonis is a basketball player.

Kasti sunku.
It is difficult to dig.

Jie visiskai sveiki.
They [are] absolutely healthy.

In these examples, the word "is" is omitted. The rules of punctuation govern when a dash is necessary and when it is not necessary.

Here is an even more sophisticated example:

Daug noresi - mazai gausi.
When you wish for a lot [of things], you will get [just] a little.

Here the words "when you ..., you will ..." have been omitted. The Lithuanian language has always been concise yet vivid until recently. Instead of saying

Nera sieno.
There is no hay.

they could have said

Ner kam dziust.
literally, There isn't anything that could become dry.

Now about things like "Been there". This is non-standard English and the correct way of saying "Been there" is "I have been there", which indicates that "I" just as any other personal pronoun is mandatory in English. "Been there" belongs to the most informal level of language register, just like "It ain't me who done it".

However, I don't deny presence of such utterances. If they exist in colloquial speech, they might as well become the norm for English after some time. Colloquial language tends to brevity and we would find similar omissions (even though they're ungrammatical and native speakers know this!) in almost any language.

In English, people might also say "He go there very often."

I find it interesting that Japanese is pro-drop both for subjects and objects, and yet its verbs don't inflect for either of them.

- Kef

K.T. :
« Je parle
I speak
Tu parles
You speak
In both languages the verbs sound alike ("s" is silent in the French example). »

Oui, et voici comment ça se passe à toutes les personnes, pour être plus précis :

{ich spreche} = {hablo}
<je parle> → [Z@paRl] = [ʒəpaʁl] — [ZpaRl] = [ʒpaʁl] — [SpaRl] = [ʃpaʁl]
<I speak> → /aI_^spi:k/ = /aɪ̯spiːk/

{du sprichst} = {hablas}
<tu parles> → [typaRl] = [typaʁl]
<you speak> → /ju:spi:k/

{er spricht} = {habla}
<il parle> → [ilpaRl] = [ilpaʁl] — [ipaRl] = [ipaʁl]
<he speaks> → /hi:spi:ks/

{wir sprechen} = {hablamos}
<nous parlons> → [nupaRlÕ] = [nupaʁlɔ̃]
<we speak> → /wi:spi:k/

{ihr sprecht} = {habláis}
<vous parlez> → [vupaRle] = [vupaʁle]
<you speak> → /ju:spi:k/

{sie sprechen} = {hablan}
<ils parlent> → [ilpaRl] = [ilpaʁl] — [ipaRl] = [ipaʁl]
<they speak> → /ðeɪ̯spi:k/




K.T. : « Spanish is a pronoun-dropping language. French is not. »

C'est vrai. Mais l'ancien français (AF) se passe volontiers du pronom personnel sujet, à l'instar du castillan, de l'italien et de l'occitan. Une exception toutefois : à la 3e personne du singulier, quand le pronom AF <il> est un pronom **impersonnel**, il est souvent présent (non élidé).

Comparer pour {es regnet} :
ancien français → <il pluet> & <Ø pluet>
français → <il pleut> mais *<Ø pleut>
castillan → <llueve> mais *<él llueve> & *<ello llueve>
italien → <piove> mais *<esso piove> & *<lui piove>
occitan → <plòu> mais *<el plòu>.

En revanche, le français moderne peut élider le pronom impersonnel <il> mais, justement, il ne s'agit plus vraiment d'un pronom personnel :
<il faut que tu saches> → <Ø faut que tu saches>
<il faudra qu'il vienne> → <Ø faudra qu'il vienne>
<il faudrait que tu partes> → <Ø faudrait que tu partes>.
Exceptions (<falloir> aux temps composés & au subjonctif) :
<il a fallu qu'il triche> → *<Ø a fallu qu'il triche>
<je pense pas qu'il faille> → *<je pense pas que Ø faille>.

Pour en revenir aux pronoms personnels au sens strict, il est intéressant de comparer <parler> au présent 6e personne avec le passé composé 5e personne :
a] <ils parlent> → [ilpaRl] = [ilpaʁl] — [ipaRl] = [ipaʁl]
b] <vous avez parlé> → [vuzavepaRle] = [vuzavepaʁle] — [zavepaRle] = [zavepaʁle].
On trouve parfois la transcription <y parlent> pour <ils parlent> et <z'avez parlé> pour <vous avez parlé>. Ce qui reflète bien qu'aucun des deux pronoms (<ils> & <vous>) n'est réellement élidé à l'oral mais, d'un autre côté, montre tout aussi nettement que la réduction de <vous> à [z] n'est pas de la même nature que la troncation de <ils> à [i].

D'ailleurs :
c] <ils ont parlé> → [ilzÕpaRle] = [ilzɔ̃paʁle] — [izÕpaRle] = [izɔ̃paʁle].
La réduction de [ilzÕpaRle] = [ilzɔ̃paʁle] à [zÕpaRle] = [zɔ̃paʁle] est beaucoup moins fréquente, voire assez rare.

Autrement dit :
/vu/ ne se réduit pas
/vuz/ se réduit à /z/
/il/ (pour <ils>) se réduit à /i/
/ilz/ (pour <ils>) se réduit à /iz/ (très rarement à /z/).

Thank-you for all the interesting examples-in all languages. I need to look at the Lithuanian example again.

It's going to sound odd, but when I hear such and such a language is "hard", I want to say "Well, at least it's an IE language. You don't know how comforting it is to see things you can recognize. In languages further afield it's like starting from square one every time unless you know a related language. So, even though I don't know Lithuanian at all, I know that that somewhere in the language I will find things that are familiar-like verbs that inflect.
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Kef,

Welcome back to Antimoon. You're right about Japanese. I thought about mentioning it, but I decided to start the topic with romance languages. I've known about this aspect of languages for years, but I didn't know that "pro drop" was the term for these kinds of languages.

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greg,

interesting stuff. I didn't know/remember that the vowels were reversed in old French for "es regnet/It rains."

Old French
il pluet> & <Ø pluet"

Modern French
Il pleut.

"On trouve parfois la transcription <y parlent> pour <ils parlent> et <z'avez parlé> pour <vous avez parlé>. Ce qui reflète bien qu'aucun des deux pronoms (<ils> & <vous>) n'est réellement élidé à l'oral mais, d'un autre côté, montre tout aussi nettement que la réduction de <vous> à [z] n'est pas de la même nature que la troncation de <ils> à [i]."

Also interesting.