LINGUIST List 4.150

Wed 03 Mar 1993

Disc: Pro-Drop

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Robert Westmoreland, 4.146 Pro-Drop

Marianna Di Paolo, Pro-Drop

Message 1: 4.146 Pro-Drop

Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 11:35:45 EST4.146 Pro-Drop
From: Robert Westmoreland <RWESTMORucs.indiana.edu>
Subject: 4.146 Pro-Drop

Regarding alleged pro-drop in colloquial English. It is immediately apparent that what is omitted in these sentences is not only the subject but also the auxiliary. This is not characteristic of pro-drop, and suggests, does it not, that we are dealing with an altogether different phenomenon.

Message 2: Pro-Drop

Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 10:50:03 MSTPro-Drop
From: Marianna Di Paolo <dipaoloanthro.utah.edu>
Subject: Pro-Drop

As Swann Philip, John Lawler, and Tom Cravens have pointed out, there is ample evidence that Pro-drop in English is a variable phenomenon. Susan Philips and Anne Reynolds have published an empirical study on pro-drop in English ("The interaction of variable syntax and discourse structure in women's and men's speech" 1987. In _Language, gender & sex in comparative perspective_. Cambridge.). (But Philips and Reynolds don't concern themselves with syntactic or typological questions concerning pro-drop.) Based on data from voir dire hearings, they show that under certain discourse conditions men are more likely than women to delete subject pronouns and HAVE and BE. I have found similar data in taperecorded formal interviews. Both sets of data could be described as sentence initial erosion. It is certainly the case that what is being lost is information known to all parties in the interaction.

Marianna Di Paolo

Message 3: Re: 4.146 Pro-Drop

Date: 03 Mar 1993 12:49:21 +0100Re: 4.146 Pro-Drop
From: "Dip.Linguistica" <DIPLINIPDUNIVX.UNIPD.IT>
Subject: Re: 4.146 Pro-Drop

As a native speaker of Italian I can say that in present subjunctive there only one pronoun which is obligatory:the second singular. Third person and first person are not obligatory at all. Moreover, if tthere is a clitic reflexive on the verb, the subject pronoun is not obligatory anymore: Credo che *(tu) parli Credo che t(tu) ti pettini. Cecilia Poletto DpilinUNIPAD.UNIPD.IT