Pro-drop Language Research Articles

‘What happened to the un-omitted subjects?’

Abstract This research examines variations of subject expression in spoken Korean. While much focus has been put on the omission of subjects in Korean as a pro-drop language, what is less explored is under what conditions choices are made into different forms when subjects are expressed, which in Korean includes not only pronouns but also kinship terms, professional titles, personal names and other lexical forms. In this paper, I test the distribution of subject expression in spoken Korean corpora for first and second person subjects and analyse the discursive aspects of the referential choices for the expressed subjects. The results confirm that first and second person subjects are expressed with varied referential forms and that relative age between discourse participants becomes a significant factor in the referential choice. This study also remarks on the importance of socio-cultural and pragmatic interpretation in the discussion of subject expression in Korean.

On Tense, agreement, and the syntax of null and overt subjects

In this paper I argue that the position and realization of subjects in adverbial non-finite clauses in Italian, Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese can provide valuable insight into the licensing conditions for pro and postverbal subjects in finite clauses in these pro-drop languages. I first provide evidence that Tense and Agreement constitute separate syntactic heads in these languages, as argued by Belletti (1990) among others, and also apply this analysis to non-finite clauses in Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. I will also argue, after analyzing the syntactic variation exhibited by subjects in non-finite clauses (containing regular and inflected infinitives) in Spanish, Galician, and European Portuguese, that (i) postverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by a full set of φ-features in Agr (overt or covert), (ii) pro is licensed by an Agr head that is overtly realized by either overt φ-features or verb movement, and (iii) preverbal overt subject DPs are licensed by verb movement to Agr.

“Não esqueça eu” - O uso do pronome sujeito EU em função de objeto no português popular do Brasil

Portuguese, like many other Romance languages, is traditionally classified as a pro-drop language with a nominative-accusative alignment in its pronominal system. This means that it basically encodes the subject function on the verb, whereas the object function is marked on the object pronoun itself. However, spoken Portuguese in Brazil has been known to have drastically readjusted its pronominal system due to the introduction of novel pronouns such as você and a gente that do not inflect for case and which both trigger the verb to be inflected for 3rd person singular. Obviously, such radical changes can affect the entire pronominal system. New evidence taken from various sources such as pop music and X (Twitter) show precisely this: loss of case distinction seems to affect also other pronouns in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese. This paper tries to follow this development with the example of the 1st person singular pronoun eu by analyzing data found on social media and comparing it to written sources as far back as the 15th century.

The Acquisition of Pragmatically Constrained Japanese Pronouns by L1 English Learners: Results from a Context Translation Task

The allocation of explicit and implicit pronouns and the literature extensively discusses the syntactic and pragmatic conditions that permit and necessitate the use of overt and null pronouns in Romance languages, such as Spanish and Italian. This topic has been explored by various researchers, including Alonso-Ovalle and D’Introno (2000), Fernández-Soriano (1989), Luján (1987, 1999), Montalbetti (1984), Rigau (1986, 1988), and Rizzi (1997). Rothman (2009) argues that the employment of overt subject pronouns in Spanish is pragmatically unusual, except in select discursive situations when their existence contributes more to semantic interpretation than just agreement features. In Japanese, null forms of pronouns are more common than overt pronouns, as observed by Martin (1976). However, like Spanish, the distribution of pronouns in Japanese is influenced by both syntax and pragmatics. In pro-drop languages, overt pronouns, as well as lexical subjects, have the role of resolving any potential uncertainties that may occur when new referents are introduced in a conversation.

Grammaticality Judgments as Evidence for Null-subject Parameter Resetting by Young and Adult Libyan EFL Learners

This study investigates a number of issues related to the differences between young and adult second language learners concerning the process of parameter resetting in cases when the first and the second language have two different values of the same parameter. The case which is examined in this study is the fact that Arabic which is the first language of the target groups of participants in this study is a pro-drop (null-subject) language, while English which they are studying as a foreign language is a non-pro- drop (non-null subject) language. The study uses Grammaticality Judgment tasks to which group of the Libyan EFL learners, the young or the adult learners’ group have reset this parameter from its value in Arabic to its different value in English. These Grammaticality Judgment tasks were applied to 91 university students who are studying in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts at Misurata University. The young learners’ group included 45 pupils in the first grades at the International Knowledge School in Misurata. The academic performance level of the participants in the two groups was considered as a factor which may affect the grammaticality judgments of the participants. The results showed that younger learners performed better in the grammaticality judgment tasks and that their judgments were not affected by the fact that their first language had a different value of the pro-drop parameter. It was also noticed that the intensive academic study at a university level did not help the older participants to be better than younger participants in this task. Moreover, the level of academic achievement was not a factor in this study that participants with lower academic levels performed better than those with higher academic levels

Acquisition of Structures at Syntax-Discourse Interface: Post-Verbal Subjects in L2 English

The present study explores the acceptability of postverbal subjects by intermediate and advanced L2 English learners with L1 Macedonian, a pro-drop Slavic language with rich verbal morphology. The two languages differ regarding the distribution of subject-verb inversion (SVI): in Macedonian, it is a default pattern in thetic sentences, but English severely restricts SVI to specific contexts. To test the hypothesis that Macedonian learners encounter difficulties in acquisition of English SVI because of crosslinguistic influence, a grammaticality judgement and correction task was administered to two groups of Macedonian learners of English and a control group of English native speakers. The results revealed that L2 learners find English VS sentences and VS + it-insertion examples more acceptable than the native speakers, but the performance of the advanced group is closer to the native speakers than to the intermediate learners. Both non-native groups accept more readily inappropriate English sentences that conform to typical L1 structures.

Grammatical categorization based on frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two parent–child corpora from the CHILDES database to determine frequent frames in Persian child-directed speech. To do so, a number of frequent frames in the two corpora and more specifically those which contained complex verbs were analyzed in detail. The results indicate that the accuracy of frequent frames in Persian (0.54) with some specific typological features is lower than that of English (0.91) at the word level due to the flexibility of the basic SOV order at the sentence level in Persian. It was also found that Persian frequent frames mostly included complex verbs. This evidence, along with the results of frames in categorizing words at this level, indicates that the accuracy of the frames is also affected by the fact that the subject position of verbs is mostly left vacant in Persian as a pro-drop language. That is why the non-finite forms of the verbs were taken into account when a verb was a part of the frames. The results also revealed that grammatical categories which mostly appeared in the context of frames were verbs, while the target words were nouns and adjectives.

South Dravidian Languages: Consistent Null Subject or Discourse Pro-Drop?

Indian languages are not mentioned in any of the canonical literature on null subject languages as they do not fall in a specific subcategory neatly. They show a relatively consistent conjugation system, but have more features of Radical pro-drop languages than Consistent Null-Subject languages. (Note 1) I examine South Dravidian languages (henceforth SDLs), which show consistent conjugation system, much like the Romance languages yet drop arguments and adjuncts profusely, especially if they are once established in the discourse. There is a sense of hesitance amongst scholars to concede and group them among Radical pro-drop languages. I follow Sigurdsson (2011) in that generative literature has ‘misjudged the role of agreement for licensing and identifying of null arguments’(Sigurdsson, 2011, p. 276) and argue that the special nature of SDLs as radical pro-drop languages that have agreement prove to be a prime example of this. SDLs prove as prime examples to suggest a unified theory of pro in line with Barbosa (2019).

Anaphoric reference in a German-Polish bilingual child

Abstract The study examines the use of referring expressions in anaphoric contexts in a German-Polish bilingual child between age 2;0 to 4;0. The longitudinal corpus consists of 160 video recordings of spontaneous speech in both languages. There are fundamental differences in the way anaphoric reference is expressed in German and Polish. Speakers of German refer to discourse-given referents either with a definite NP, a personal or a demonstrative pronoun. Speakers of Polish – a pro drop language without articles – mostly use bare nouns or null pronouns. Overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners are restricted to specific information structure conditions. We found an overuse of overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners in Polish in comparison to a monolingual Polish child of the same age and also qualitative differences in the use of the relevant expressions. Despite the fact that the earliest child grammar in both languages rather resembles the Polish target (no articles, no pronouns), the reliable markers of discourse-givenness encountered in the German input are rapidly acquired and overextended to Polish, before the more implicit Polish system is in place.

Discourse function of personal pronouns in a slavic pro-drop language: Evidence from Croatian L1 argumentative writing

Abstract At the discourse level, personal pronouns have been acknowledged as one of the most important features used to express writer visibility – involvement of the author in the text. Studies have shown that writer visibility depends on discourse type, cultural conventions, writer’s L1, etc. (Petch-Tyson 1998; Ädel 2001; Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011; Zolotova 2014). This paper investigates the discourse function of personal pronouns in argumentative writing in the Croatian language, a Slavic pro-drop language. For the purpose of this paper argumentative essays written by Croatian native speakers (N=100) are analysed for the frequencies of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns and their discourse functions. The results confirmed low frequency of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns in the corpus, with the dominance of the 1st person singular personal pronoun I. The qualitative analysis shows that the pronoun I is most frequently used to express discourse functions of writer’s stance and writer’s experience, whereas all of the other pronouns were used mostly to express more general claims. The obtained results gave more insight into the use of personal pronouns in a pro-drop language and confirm cultural and linguistic influences on argumentative writing in the first language.

Processing pro-drop features in heritage Turkish.

Previous studies have reported that null subject is not completely lost in heritage speakers, but there is an increase in the production and acceptance of overt subjects. Turkish is a pro-drop language and as a typical feature of pro-drop languages, it requires obligatory verb agreement marking for sentences with null subjects. However, Turkish subject-verb agreement marking is an example of optional agreement in which the 3rd person plural subject has optionality and can be used with singular verb forms under certain conditions. The current study investigates the reading times (RTs) of plural-marked and unmarked verbs in sentences with overt and null subjects during real time sentence processing in comparison to non-heritage speakers of Turkish via a self-paced reading experiment. Significant differences were observed between the heritage and non-heritage speakers of Turkish indicating both quantitative and qualitative real-time processing differences between the two groups. These differences suggest that Turkish heritage speakers need more time to integrate the information in real time processing.

Estudio de las variables predictoras de la expresión del sujeto pronominal en el corpus PRESEEA. Málaga. Nivel de instrucción bajo

The absence or presence of the subject personal pronoun is a linguistic phenomenon typical of pro-drop languages. This paper initiates a series of studies that try to find the linguistic and social determinants that affect the occurrence of this pronoun in the variety of Spanish spoken in Malaga (Spain). We show partial results concerning speakers with a low educational level obtained from the study of the first linguistic corpus of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish from Spain and American in Malaga (PRESEEA-Malaga) collected in the 1990s. For this purpose, we assume the methodology employed in other studies within the framework of the pan-Hispanic preseea project to compare the results obtained. We use the Coding Guide for the variable “expression of the pronominal subject” (Bentivoglio, Ortiz and Silva-Corvalán, 2011), although we have updated and adapted it. The exploratory analysis helps us to broadly compare the percentages of pronoun presence with previous studies carried out in different Spanish-speaking geographical areas. The correlation analysis allows us to observe which predictor variables favour its presence or omission and to assess whether there are similarities with the data from the corpora of Málaga (2015) and other cities such as Granada (2016), Seville (2019) and Valencia (2021), to finally establish a possible linguistic pattern.

What is the opposite of Henduo ‘many’ in Mandarin?

Abstract This article first studies the contrastive properties of Q-adjectives many and few, as well as henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ in Mandarin from the perspective of their strengths as determiners (Milsark, 1974 & 1977). Although all falling into the weak-determiner category for being existential and indefinite, many/henduo show more properties as leaning towards strong definiteness and universal quantification than few/henshao. Secondly, because of the kind-demoting mass NP nature of Chinese nouns and the fact that Mandarin is a topic-comment pro-drop language, henduo ‘many’ and henshao ‘few’ can appear both in the pre-nominal attributive and the predicative positions, unlike their English counterparts many and few that cannot be used as predicates due to the token-denoting nature of English nouns and that English is not a pro-drop language. I also argue that the determiner strengths demonstrated by Q-adjectives are not related to indefinite specificity.

MORPHOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF BALOCHI VERBS

This study aims to explore the properties of Balochi verbs in Makrani dialect. Verbs in Balochi are focused to see their properties in terms of derivations and inflections along with tense, aspect, number, person, voice, and mood. For this qualitative study (Creswell, 2014), the data have been collected through recording of unstructured interviews from native participants. The data have been analysed through Radford’s (2009) ‘theory of agreement’. In this process, it is found that Balochi, being a pro-drop language, subject agrees with the verb and verb with its subject. It is also found that verbs in Balochi have various properties and these properties are generalized by tense, number, mood, voice, and person. It is found that there are four moods in Balochi which are indicative, subjunctive, imperative and optative. The analysis of the study also shows that future simple and present simple have equal range of tense structure; in other words, they have the same structure. Numbers in Balochi sometime have zero formats and sometime singular nouns carry suffix ‘ئے=a/e=agreement’ and plural suffix ‘آں=aan=agreement’.Voice in Balochi always carries infinitive form of the verb. The study also finds that Balochi has different personal ending suffixes for each person. Keywords: Balochi, Inflections, Makrani, Morphology, Suffixation, Verbs

A Contrastive Study on Object Pronouns of Korean and Indonesian for Korean Language Learners - Based on Korean-Indonesian Parallel Corpus -

This study aims to describe and analyze Korean and Indonesian object pronouns based on a Korean-Indonesian parallel corpus. Both Korean and Indonesian are categorized as ‘discourse pro-drop languages’ that allow arguments(subjects and objects) to be dropped. However, the object elliption in Indonesian is more restrained because in independent clauses the object cannot be ommited. The results of the Korean-Indonesian parallel corpus showed that there were instances when Korean object pronouns corresponded with Indonesian object pronouns and when they did not. The Indonesian object pronoun is controlled by its verb’s transitivity and therefore can appear even when the object pronoun in the Korean text was expressed using zero anaphor. The Korean object pronoun when overtly expressed, displayed new information, focus or emphasis. In addition, we also observed cases on the account of different language expression, Korean and Indonesian preference on expression was discovered.

Pragmatic understanding of subject expression in spoken Korean

Whereas there are a number of studies that address subject omission in Korean as a pro-drop language, expressed subjects have been less explored. I argue that the reasons for expressed subjects to remain un-omitted are found in their pragmatic effects rather than elsewhere. This study particularly investigates the pragmatic effects of the alternation among reference forms for the expressed subject in spoken Korean and uses three different spoken corpora to identify specific examples of the relevant effects. I believe that this study makes a significant contribution to the literature because it shows that shifts among different reference forms play a crucial role in conveying specific pragmatic effects. In particular, I have categorised the pragmatic effects of expressed subjects into two categories, (im)politeness and authority, and intimacy and estrangement, by the characteristics of interpersonal behaviours.

Expletive ta in Mandarin Chinese: A Quantitative Study

Expletive pronouns have posed significant challenges to both linguistic studies and natural language processing in Chinese. Based on the data from the Chinese corpus at the Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University (CCL), this paper investigates the automatic dependency parsing errors of expletive ta (“it/he”) and relative constructions and provides a detailed quantitative analysis of the characteristics of the constructions in question. The findings not only provide evidence to show that even in radical pro-drop languages such as Mandarin, pleonastics can occur in both object and subject positions but also offer important insights for Chinese natural language processing.

The interpretational preferences of null and overt pronouns in Chinese

We report three reading comprehension experiments investigating the interpretational preferences and processing ofproand overt pronouns in Chinese, a ‘discourse-oriented’pro-drop language (Huang 1984). Our offline rating experiments showed that bothproand overt pronouns were subject-based, but the preference for the subject antecedents was stronger withprothan with overt pronouns. In addition, these different levels of subject biases were confirmed in a self-paced reading experiment; a processing penalty was incurred with object antecedent interpretation regardless of the pronominal type, but the penalty was bigger forprothan for overt pronouns. These experimental results are consistent with Accessibility theory that less specific anaphoric expressions (e.g.pro) were less likely than more specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. overt pronouns) to refer to a less prominent antecedent (e.g. syntactic object).

Connected Speech Characteristics of Bengali Speakers With Alzheimer's Disease: Evidence for Language-Specific Diagnostic Markers.

Background and aim: Speech and language characteristics of connected speech provide a valuable tool for identifying, diagnosing and monitoring progression in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Our knowledge of linguistic features of connected speech in AD is primarily derived from English speakers; very little is known regarding patterns of linguistic deficits in speakers of other languages, such as Bengali. Bengali is a highly inflected pro-drop language from the Indo-Aryan language family. It is the seventh most spoken language in the world, yet to date, no studies have investigated the profile of linguistic impairments in Bengali speakers with AD. The aim of this study was to characterize connected speech production and identify the linguistic features affected in Bengali speakers with AD.Methods: Participants were six Bengali speaking AD patients and eight matched controls from the urban metropolis, Kolkata, India. Narrative samples were elicited in Bengali using the Frog Story. Samples were analyzed using the Quantitative Production Analysis and the Correct Information Unit analyses to quantify six different aspects of speech production: speech rate, structural and syntactic measures, lexical measures, morphological and inflectional measures, semantic measures and measure of spontaneity and fluency disruptions.Results and conclusions: In line with the extant literature from English speakers, the Bengali AD participants demonstrated decreased speech rate, simplicity of sentence forms and structures, and reduced semantic content. Critically, differences with English speakers' literature emerged in the domains of Bengali specific linguistic features, such as the pro-drop nature of Bengali and its inflectional properties of nominal and verbal systems. Bengali AD participants produced fewer pronouns, which is in direct contrast with the overuse of pronouns by English AD participants. No obvious difficulty in producing nominal and verbal inflections was evident. However, differences in the type of noun inflections were evident; these were characterized by simpler inflectional features used by AD speakers. This study represents the first of its kind to characterize connected speech production in Bengali AD participants and is a significant step forward toward the development of language-specific clinical markers in AD. It also provides a framework for cross-linguistic comparisons across structurally distinct and under-explored languages.

Clitics are not enough: on agreement and null subjects in Brazilian Venetan

This paper presents some facts about the syntax of subject pronouns in contact. We investigate agreement and EPP-checking in Brazilian Venetan, a heritage northern Italo-Romance variety spoken in southern Brazil in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. Central Venetan, the northern Italo-Romance variety that constitutes the basis of Brazilian Venetan, is a null-subject language presenting agreement-like subject clitics; Brazilian Portuguese is a partial pro-drop language, in which null subjects are allowed only in precise syntactic conditions and it is developing reduced pronominal subjects. We will address two changes we detected in Brazilian Venetan with respect to the syntax of subject pronouns: the non-contrastive realisation of the first person singular tonic pronoun, and the change in the syntax of subject clitics, which seem to be used as weak pronouns rather than agreement items. We will claim that the first change has to be connected to the simplification of interface conditions between syntax and discourse, a pattern which is commonly attested in bilingual speakers, while the second can be quite safely ascribed to the contact with a partially overlapping structure, namely the reduced pronominal subjects in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. We analyse the two phenomena, trying to find possible links between them in order to develop an analysis of subject clitics in contact and the conditions in which we may most probably find an effect of contact.