[Lingtyp] Typological survey of pro-drop

[Haspelmath, Martin]

It seems that the most important contributions to these questions are still Siewierska (2004: "Person") and Dryer (2005) (his WALS chapter on the expression of pronominal subjects; here's the 2013 version: https://wals.info/chapter/101).

It's actually a bit embarrassing that there is so little worldwide research on this – but it illustrates the fact that while typological research is in high demand, there are few people who are actually doing it.

But of course, there are also the big conceptual problems that contiue to haunt us – here, the fact that "pro-drop" is an English-based stereotype that does not really translate into a clear typological parameter. Should we say that the subject is "dropped" in a Spanish sentence like "vien-es?" ("Are you coming?), where the suffix "-es" expresses the 2nd person subject? This seems Anglocentric. (More about this here: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1340)

But regardless of what exactly we mean by "dropping", these core questions need to be studied further if we want an unbiased understanding of the world's grammars.

Best,
Martin

On 13.02.20 23:15, Kristen Howell wrote:
Dear all,

Is anyone aware of a typological survey on argument optionality or pro-drop cross linguistically. In particular, I am trying to find out what is the most common way pro-drop occurs (or doesn't occur). For example:

-subject dropping does not occur
-subject dropping is only allowed for certain verbs
-subject dropping is allowed for any verb

And similarly for objects:
-object dropping does not occur
-object dropping is only allowed for certain verbs
-object dropping is allowed for any verb

I'd be grateful for any pointers to a survey which can answer this question. I'm happy to take suggestions off list and will post a summary of results.

Thanks in advance,
Kristen



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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
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig
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