Pronoun Dropping in ChiShona: A Comparative Approach

Victor Mugari

doi:10.5755/j01.sal.0.23.5510

Abstract

The issue of pronoun dropping has widely been established amongst Romance languages. While it is generally claimed that most morphologically agglutinative languages have pro-drop properties, there is a need to investigate and establish how different languages fair with this notion and note if there are any language peculiar idiosyncratic properties. This paper analyses pro-drop properties of the chiShona language, making comparisons to the well documented and prototypical pro-drop Italian language. The paper is largely comparative and descriptive in nature with Italian and English as our reference points for pro-dropping and non-pro-dropping respectively. Our findings are that chiShona is clearly a pro-drop language, characteristics of which tally with most properties that identify with this phenomenon in Italian. However, chiShona has its own idiosyncratic properties that differ from Italian, for instance the wh-word can freely occupy the position immediately after the complementizer and also the post sentential position without vitiating the intended questioning. The wh-word in chiShona has much free play to the extent of occupying the final position in the sentence. In terms of subject omission in weather verbs, the difference between chiShona and Italian is that in Italian, the existence of the subject pronoun makes the sentence ungrammatical whereas in chiShona it remains a grammatical option. Our findings support the pro-drop phenomenon as a universal language parameter that however exhibit language internal idiosyncratic differences. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.23.5510

Highlights

This paper focuses on the notion of pronoun dropping in chiShona, focusing on the pro-drop parameter, which Chomsky (1981) says is typically found in most of the Romance languages like Italian
A number of phenomena associated with the pro-drop parameter were investigated, some of which were shown to be relevant to chiShona, whilst others were shown not to be
Unlike Italian which requires an obligatory omission of the topic-linked subject, the chiShona language does not obligatorily omit the topic-linked subject

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses on the notion of pronoun dropping in chiShona, focusing on the pro-drop parameter, which Chomsky (1981) says is typically found in most of the Romance languages like Italian. At the expense of indigenous varieties, English assumes the official language status and the medium of instruction in schools and government It is spoken as a minor language in parts of neighboring countries like southern Malawi, western Mozambique, southern Zambia and eastern Botswana. It is morphologically agglutinative, exhibiting an elaborate derivational and inflectional system with affixation as the major mechanism for word formation. The aim of this paper, is to establish if chiShona qualifies as a pro-drop language in the similar way as the non-Bantu language families do, comparing to Romance languages such as Italian, Spanish etc. The data was qualitatively analyzed through comparing chiShona to Italian and applying the defining heuristics of the pro-drop parameter to chiShona data

Literature Review

Findings

Conclusion