Is Japanese a pro-drop language?

Among major languages, for example, Chinese and Japanese are pro-drop languages (Huang 1984; Nakamura 1987), while English is not (Haspelmath 2001). Without loss of generality, we take both Chinese–English and Japanese–English examples to illustrate this phenomenon.

Is English pro-drop language?

Cross-linguistic variation

It has been observed that pro-drop languages are those with either rich inflection for person and number (Persian, Polish, Portuguese, etc.) or no such inflection at all (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.), but languages that are intermediate (English, French, etc.) are non-pro-drop.

Is Korean a pro-drop language?

Among major languages, Japanese and Korean are considered pro-drop languages. Japanese and Korean feature pronoun deletion not only for subjects, but for practically all grammatical contexts.

Is Russian pro-drop language?

For further information I'd recommend you to checkout the last link, but to sum it up: Russian is a pro-drop language, but less pro-drop that Japanese or Spanish. There are some reasons for this, one of most notable is lack of information we can get from verbs in past tence.

Is Italian pro-drop?

Thanks to their rich morphology, Italian and Spanish allow pro-drop pronouns, i.e., non lexically-realized subject pronouns.

Is Arabic pro-drop?

Being a null-subject language, Arabic exhibits a phenomenon known as pro-drop, where subject pronouns are omitted yet semantic information remains, so that the meaning of a sentence can be determined from the grammatical context.

Is Turkish pro-drop?

A similar language is Turkish, which is also a pro- drop language that obligatorily marks the verb for subject agreement (Zimmer 1976). It also allows both null subjects and pronominal subjects (Enç 1986). There have been some studies on the acquisition of Turkish subject pronouns.

Is Persian pro-drop?

Persian is a null-subject or pro-drop language, so personal pronouns (e.g. 'I', 'he', 'she') are optional.

Is Icelandic pro-drop?

Rich verb agreement, no pro drop.

Icelandic has a very rich verbal paradigm. Some verbs take six distinct forms in the present tense, although many verbs have at least one syncretic pair. And generally you get 1st and 3rd person syncretism in the past tense and in the subjunctive.

Is Finnish a pro-drop language?

As in other partial pro-drop languages, in BP and Finnish, 3rd definite subject pronouns can be null in embedded clauses, but not in root clauses. In impersonal sentences, however, 3rd generic subject can be null (cf.

Is Spanish a null subject language?

Spanish is a null subject language, meaning that the grammatical subject of a clause is permitted to be phonologically null or silent, as is illustrated in (1): (1) Hablaron de política.

Why does Spanish drop the subject?

This is due to the complex nature of Spanish verbs. In short, verbs in Spanish change their conjugation (end syllable) depending on their subject. This also occurs in English but to a much lesser extent. Let us consider the verb 'hacer', meaning 'to do'.

Is Korean null subject?

In DO languages, like Korean, the domain is discourse, in which null arguments can be bound to any discourse antecedent. In non-DO languages, the recovery domain is a sentence, in which the recovery must take place via rich inflections within a sentence boundary, as in languages like Spanish.

Is Malayalam a pro-drop language?

It is a pro-drop language; in fact, it allows an argument to surface as a null element in all positions except the object position of a postposition. All of these properties of Malayalam are shared with the other major Dravidian languages.

Why do people leave out pronouns?

Linguists, who call the axing of pronouns from the start of a statement “conversational deletion,” classify it as an expedient form of ellipsis, or the scraping away of words that are nevertheless understood in context. For them, it's a matter of convenience, but also destiny.

What is radical pro-drop?

Abstract. We propose a new generalization governing the crosslinguistic distribution of radical pro drop (the type of pro drop found in Chinese). It occurs only in languages whose pronouns are agglutinating for case, number, or some other nominal feature.

What is the pro-drop parameter?

Pro-drop parameter or Null subject parameter is the parameter which determines whether a language is a pro-drop language or not. A positive setting of the parameter allows an empty pro-element to be identified by its governor. This is the case in pro-drop languages.

What are subject pronouns?

Subject pronouns are those pronouns that perform the action in a sentence. They are I, you, he, she, we, they, and who. Any noun performing the main action in the sentence, like these pronouns, is a subject and is categorized as subjective case (nominative case).

What is a Pronominal subject?

Pronominal subjects are expressed by subject pronouns that occur in a different syntactic position from full noun phrase subjects. 67. Pronominal subjects are expressed only by pronouns in subject position, but these pronouns are often left out. 61. More than one of the above types with none dominant.

What languages are SOV?

Languages that have SOV structure include all Indo-Iranian languages (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Urdu, Zazaki, Kurdish), Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Assyrian, Aymara, Basque, Burmese, Burushaski, Cherokee, Dakota, Dogon languages, ...

Are there genders in Farsi?

Persian is commonly considered a genderless language, but can be considered to have a pronominal gender system with common and neuter genders represented in the pronouns. For both males and females, the same nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are used.

Is Farsi SOV or SVO?

Like Latin, Persian is an SOV language.

What is a verb raising in syntax?

Verb raising is a verb movement to V, which has been posited for infinitival verbs in German and Dutch. The hypothesis is that the verb of an infinitival complement, if the complement is not in extraposition, is moved and adjoined to its governing verb, thereby creating a verb-cluster.

What is an overt pronoun?

The overt pronoun constraint (OPC) states that, in null subject languages, overt pronoun subjects of embedded clauses cannot be bound by wh- or quantifier antecedents.