[Lingtyp] typological studies of pro-drop

[Daniel Ross]

Hi Maïa,

Miriam Meyerhoff has a good discussion of pro-drop in Bislama in her
dissertation:
https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9800901/
(The PDF is I believe open access on Proquest, linked from that page,
although it isn't loading for me at the moment for some reason.)

There's also a 2001 article with some of the same content:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3623440

The article and dissertation also compare the use of overt/dropped subjects
in Bislama to switch-reference (and echo-subject) systems, linking the two
senses of "switch-reference" in the literature:
1. The morphosyntactic marker sense, referring to medial verb suffixes that
indicate whether the subject of the following clause is the same as the
subject as the next or not.
2. Popularized by Cameron 1995, and originating with Carmen
Silva-Corvalán's 1977 MA thesis based indirectly on discussions of the
other type of SR by other researchers in California at the time (Munro,
etc.), "switch-reference" also now is used in discussions of especially
Spanish pragmatics/acquisition regarding when subjects are dropped,
specifically in the same subject context whereas new subjects ('switch
reference') often do not result in a dropped pronoun.

The first is a generally obligatory morphosyntactic phenomenon, while the
second is a statistical pattern. Givón has also written some things that
link the two in a pragmatic sense. Of course the Bislama case is more like
the second because there is no obligatory marking of SR in Bislama. And the
presense of SR in that statistical pro-drop sense appears to apply to all
languages studied so far, as far as I know, from various Romance languages
to others like Japanese and Chinese, and even in some signed languages.
Givón's work also suggests something similar for AND vs. BUT conjunctions
in English and other languages (the former more common for same-subject and
the latter for different-subject).

Meyerhoff's work addresses pro-drop in Bislama directly. But I mention the
rest as a way of considering pro-drop statistically from a comparative
perspective in case that helps.

Daniel

On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 11:10 PM, Maia Ponsonnet <maia.ponsonnet at uwa.edu.au>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
>
> Related to Honors supervision, I am looking for typological works on
> pro-drop.
>
> Anything on pro-drop in creole languages will be particularly relevant.
>
>
> With many thanks for your help, cheers,
>
> Maïa
>
>
> Dr Maïa Ponsonnet
> Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
> ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Fellow
>
>
> Social Sciences Building, Room 2.47
> Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education
> The University of Western Australia
> 35 Stirling Hwy, Perth, WA (6009), Australia
> P.  +61 (0) 8 6488 2870 <+61%208%206488%202870> - M.  +61 (0) 468 571 030
> <+61%20468%20571%20030>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20180304/9e7a4db0/attachment.htm>