[Lingtyp] typological studies of "pro-drop"

Tue Mar 6 13:02:13 UTC 2018

Dear All,

it's also worth looking at the corpus-based approaches to referential 
null subjects.

Enclosed is the result of a cross-corpus investigation into rates of 
null subjects, based on spontaneous spoken language from seven languages.
Note that for the analysis, null subjects are only counted in positions 
where an overt argument could theoretically have occurred.

The data are taken from the from the freely-accessible Multi-CAST 
archive (the analysis attached is part of a users' guide-document that 
we are currently compiling). The corpus is:
Haig, Geoffrey & Schnell, Stefan (eds.)/. /2018[2015]. /Multi-CAST: 
Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts/. 
(https://lac.uni-koeln.de/en/multicast/) (Accessed 2018-03-06.)

The corpus data won't (at least immediately) yield much for the 
fine-grained typology that Anders Holmberg and others have proposed, but 
I share Matthew Dryer's reservations with regard to the possibility of 
reliably extracting the necessary information on them from descriptive 
grammars. This is a matter of natural discourse, which is beyond the 
purview of many descriptive grammars).

What the atached corpus-based approach, even at this very coarse and 
provisional level,  already suggests is (a) languages vary significantly 
in this respect (no big surprise), (b) they vary internally; (c) they 
don't seem to fall into obviously identifiable 'types'.

Some other relevant literature:
The most detailed studies I am aware of on this is the work on Spanish, 
done from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, cf. the papers in:

Carvalho, Ana M., Rafael Orozco, Naomi Lapidus Shin (eds.). 2015. 
*Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective*. 
Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.

While not typological in the narrow sense of the word, this work is 
methodologically interesting and also addresses an issue that we 
typologists tend to avoid, namely language-internal variation across 
typological parameters.

Finally, I can definitely recommend anyone interested in this subject to 
take a careful look at Huang, Yan. 2000. Anaphora. A cross-linguistic 
study. OUP, before embarking on typological work on pro-drop.

best
Geoff

Am 05.03.2018 um 18:00 schrieb Emily M. Bender:
> Dear Maïa, Dear all,
>
> Possibly also relevant is Safiyyah Saleem's MA thesis:
>
>   * Safiyyah Saleem
>     <https://www.linkedin.com/in/safiyyah-saleem-59946117>(CLMA
>     <http://compling.uw.edu/>) 2010./Argument Optionality: A New
>     Library for the Grammar Matrix Customization System
>     <http://www.delph-in.net/matrix/saleem-thesis.pdf>/
>   * http://www.delph-in.net/matrix/saleem-thesis.pdf
>
> This reports on a computational implementation of argument optionality 
> patterns as understood from the typological literature.
>
> Emily
>
> On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 1:01 AM, Martin Haspelmath 
> <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
>     See the APiCS chapter on the "expression of pronominal subjects"
>     (http://apics-online.info/parameters/62.chapter.html
>     <http://apics-online.info/parameters/62.chapter.html>), inspired
>     by Matthew Dryer's corresponding WALS feature
>     (http://wals.info/feature/101A).
>
>     I would also recommend Anna Siewierska's works, especially her
>     1999 paper (in Folia Linguistica) and her 2004 book (Person).
>
>     But I think it's important to recognize that the notion of
>     "pro-drop" is very confusing, and remains popular only because
>     many linguists don't know much more than English and Spanish (and
>     they feel that Spanish "drops" what would be a personal pronoun in
>     English). In fact, however, the Spanish type is FAR more common in
>     the world's languages than the Swedish type (where subject
>     personal pronouns are obligatory, and there is no person-marking
>     on the verb at all), as can be seen in Matthew Dryer's WALS
>     chapter. The English/German type (with obligatory personal
>     pronouns, plus person-marking on the verb) is extremely rare (as
>     noted by Siewierska 1999).
>
>     (Note also that "person-drop" would be a better term, because not
>     all pronouns can be "dropped", e.g. interrogatives and
>     demonstratives.)
>
>     Martin
>
>     On 05.03.18 08:10, Maia Ponsonnet 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 - M.  +61 (0) 468 571 030
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>     -- 
>     Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
>     Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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>
>
> -- 
> Emily M. Bender
> Professor, Department of Linguistics
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