[Lingtyp] Partial pro-drop

[Aleksandrs Berdicevskis]

Dear Yiming and Omri,

In this short paper <https://aclanthology.org/2020.tlt-1.8.pdf>, we
perform, inter alia, a corpus comparison of the optionality of subject
pronouns ("partial pro-drop") across Slavic languages, and show that in
East Slavic languages, the pronouns are less frequent in the present tense
(where the person of the subject is indexed on the verb) than in the past
tense (where it isn't). For most other Slavic languages, the pronoun
frequency is the same across tenses (and the person indexing on the verb is
also the same). (See similar observations in Seo 2001 that Greville cited.)

Reference: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Karsten Schmidtke-Bode, Ilja Seržant
(2020): Subjects tend to be coded only once: Corpus-based and grammar-based
evidence for an efficiency-driven trade-off, in Proceedings of the 19th
International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories, TLT 2020,
27–28 October 2020, Düsseldorf, Germany, pages 79-92

Best regards,
Sasha

---
Aleksandrs Berdicevskis
Researcher, Associate professor
Språkbanken Text
Department of Swedish, Multilingualism, Language Technology
University of Gothenburg

On Wed, 29 Oct 2025 at 17:55, Greville Corbett via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Here is a comparison across various Slavonic languages, which are pro-drop
> to different degrees.
>
> Seo, Seunghyun. 2001. The frequency of null subject in Russian, Polish,
> Czech, Bulgarian and Serbo-
> Croatian: an analysis according to morphosyntactic environments. PhD
> dissertation, Indiana
> University. Distributed by UMI, Ann Arbor, reference 3038515.
>
> Very best
> Grev
>
>
> On 29 Oct 2025, at 15:58, Silvia Luraghi via Lingtyp <
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>
> In Italian, the singular forms of the subjunctive are syncretic. The
> subject that cannot usually be dropped is the second person; in general,
> the second person subject seems to be the one that is least likely to be
> dropped in Northern Italian varieties that have obligatory (but in some
> cases 'droppable') subject prefixes.
> On the other hand, in Hittite, normally a pro-drop language, third person
> subjects of intransitive verbs are obligatory.
>
> Silvia Luraghi
> Università di Pavia
> Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Sezione di Linguistica
> Strada Nuova 65
> I-27100 Pavia
> tel.: +39/0382/984685
> Web page personale: https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=68
>
>
> Il giorno mer 29 ott 2025 alle ore 16:52 Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <
> lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> ha scritto:
>
>> In Spanish, the first and third person singular of the verb are syncretic
>> in most TAM categories. Lehmann 2009 shows that in a relatively small
>> portion of occurrences, the reference is disambiguated by a subject
>> pronoun. In the majority of relevant cases, the task of disambiguation is
>> just left to the hearer.
>>
>> Lehmann, Christian 2009, “El papel del pronombre personal sujeto en la
>> desambiguación de formas verbales sincréticas”. Sánchez Miret, Fernando
>> (ed.), *Romanistica sin complejos. Homenaje a Carmen Pensado*. Bern
>> etc.: P. Lang; 147-170. [ descargar
>> <https://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/lehmann_pronombre.pdf> ]
>>
>> --
>>
>> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
>> Rudolfstr. 4
>> 99092 Erfurt
>> Deutschland
>> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
>> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
>> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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