[Lingtyp] Partial pro-drop

[Heaton, Raina]

Dear Yiming and Omri,

There are interesting pro-drop (and verbal pronominal elipsis) phenomena in the Enlhet-Enenlhet family. These languages have a single 2/3 person category, and impressionistically particularly 2nd person independent pronouns are used to disambiguate 2 vs. 3 reference. There may not even be 3rd person independent pronominals in all languages.

The descriptive work for most of these languages is ongoing, the most extensive treatment is in Elliott 2021<https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/452a46a3-2e2a-4cb7-b41e-8e2606bbb867> on Enxet Sur.


Raina Heaton, Ph.D.

Associate Professor | Native American Studies

Associate Curator | Sam Noble Museum

The University of Oklahoma

2401 Chautauqua Ave | Norman, Oklahoma 73019

405-325-7588 | samnoblemuseum.ou.edu<https://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/>



________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Aleksandrs Berdicevskis via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2025 3:11 PM
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Partial pro-drop

Dear Yiming and Omri, In this short paper, 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
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Dear Yiming and Omri,

In this short paper<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://aclanthology.org/2020.tlt-1.8.pdf__;!!GNU8KkXDZlD12Q!6fu11lrSx_T7lr5hrYw7JHq5tMs4Jj1pikEOtQPmK69YYNg7AzJXV83pX452mlygugtIhpDdohHDknA7xnf9czlmT8FK$>, 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<mailto: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<mailto: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<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=68__;!!GNU8KkXDZlD12Q!6fu11lrSx_T7lr5hrYw7JHq5tMs4Jj1pikEOtQPmK69YYNg7AzJXV83pX452mlygugtIhpDdohHDknA7xnf9c_O1psnI$>


Il giorno mer 29 ott 2025 alle ore 16:52 Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto: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/fundus/pdf.gif]<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/lehmann_pronombre.pdf__;!!GNU8KkXDZlD12Q!6fu11lrSx_T7lr5hrYw7JHq5tMs4Jj1pikEOtQPmK69YYNg7AzJXV83pX452mlygugtIhpDdohHDknA7xnf9czGRvq6s$> ]

--

Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Rudolfstr. 4
99092 Erfurt
Deutschland

Tel.:   +49/361/2113417
E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de<mailto:christianw_lehmann at arcor.de>
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