[Lingtyp] Partial pro-drop

[Anders Holmberg]

Dear Yiming and Omri,
You may already be familiar with the work on partial pro-drop by me and my co-authors (for example in Biberauer, T. et al. 2010. Parametric variation: Null subjects in minimalist theory. CUP.) but still, here is a thought on the question why 3rd person is the one that is not null, in many of the partial pro-drop lnguages:  A property that many of the partial pro-drop languages share is that they have a null generic 3rd person pronoun, like English ‘one’, which the consistent pro-drop languages don’t have. In those, the generic pronominal subject has to be overtly expressed, somehow. A way to understand this is that the subject agreement morpheme in consistent pro-drop languages, including 3rd person, is referential. It can function as a referential subject, so no pronoun is required (that’s pro-drop). But then, because it’s referential, it can’t be used as a generic pronoun. In partial pro-drop languages the agreement morpheme isn’t referential, it’s just agreement, so if the subject is referential, a pronoun is required, either an overt one, or one that has an overt antecedent in a higher clause – which is the typical situation. The first and second person pronouns can be null because they always have a ‘contextual antecedent’, the speaker and the addressee, the 3rd person can if it has an overt linguistic antecedent or if it’s generic.
      BTW, a least some Indo-Aryan languages have partial pro-drop, of the same type as Hebrew, Finnish, etc. (Marathi, Assamese, …)
       For your research on partial pro-drop, can I also recommend that you take a look at Holmberg, A. 2017. ‘Linguistic Typology’.  In Roberts, Ian (ed.) 2017. Oxford handbook of Universal Grammar, 355-376, the section on pro-drop. There is a word of caution there regarding relying on descriptive grammars when it comes to explicit claims about pro-drop in the language. Since most or probably all languages use some ‘pro-drop’ it can be  hard for a grammarian to say what kind of pro-drop the language uses. What you can do instead, though, is look at example sentences in the grammar that are not intended to exemplify pro-drop, and see how pronouns are used in those examples.

Good luck with your research!

Anders



From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> On Behalf Of Omri Amiraz via Lingtyp
Sent: 29 October 2025 15:39
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: [Lingtyp] Partial pro-drop


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Dear colleagues,

We are conducting a study on the inverse correlation between the frequency of pro-drop (omission of the subject argument) and syncretism in verbal subject-marking paradigms.

We are particularly interested in partial pro-drop languages, where subject omission is restricted to certain persons or other grammatical conditions. For example, in Hebrew, pro-drop is fairly common in the past tense for first and second person, but relatively rare for third person. This is puzzling, since the past-tense paradigm in Hebrew shows no syncretism, so it is unclear why the third-person pronoun cannot generally be omitted as well.

We would greatly appreciate your input on the following points:

1. Are you aware of other languages that exhibit partial pro-drop?
We are currently aware of Hebrew, Finnish, Yiddish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Russian. This might point to an areal phenomenon, so examples from other areas would be especially valuable.

2. In the languages you are familiar with, does third person indeed tend to be the least likely to allow pro-drop?
If so, are you aware of any proposed explanations for this asymmetry?

Many thanks in advance for your insights,
Yiming and Omri
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