When pro pro Pro-drop Languages Don't: on Overt Pronominal Subjects in Greek

Penn Working Papers in Linguistics , v . 2 . 2 ( 1995 ) When pro - Drop Languages Don ' t : On Overt Pronominal Subjects

When Pro - Drop Languages Don ’ t : Overt Pronominal Subjects and Pragmatic Inference

In a language that allows null pronouns, why would a speaker bother to use an overt pronoun at all? A traditional answer is that an overt pronoun contains agreement information necessary for the identification of its antecedent. But this cannot possibly be the answer in languages like Turkish, which has subject-verb agreement, but no gender; since the verb already indicates the person and numbe...

Null subjects in English – economically motivated ?

While it is well-known that (pronominal) subjects can be omitted not only in pro-drop languages such as Russian or Italian, but also in certain registers of English (e.g. diaries), non-overt subjects in casual spoken English have not yet been analysed in any detail. This paper will discuss the factors possibly influencing the choice of overt or non-overt pronouns in a recently collected corpus ...

Pro-Drop and Impoverishment

It is often assumed that some notion of morphological richness plays a central role in the theory of pro-drop: In languages with sufficiently rich verbal φ-feature (person, number, gender) agreement morphology, pronominal arguments can (and, in some contexts, must) remain without phonological realization; in languages without such a rich verbal agreement morphology, pronominal arguments must be...

Extending partial pro-drop in Modern Hebrew: A comprehensive analysis

The phenomenon of pro-drop whereby pronominal arguments may be omitted in particular contexts is well-known and well-studied. Moreover, the notion of the Null Subject Parameter, which presumably distinguishes between those languages which allow unexpressed pronominal subjects (i.e., pro-drop languages) and those which do not, is prevalent in the transformational syntax literature. Modern Hebrew...