Re: Pro-drop was RE: Conlang collaboration

From: "Joe" <joe@...>
Subject: Re: Pro-drop was RE: Conlang collaboration


> Why, though, isn't germanic pro-drop? 'kills him' would be impossible with
any
> other pronoun apart from 'he', and German is even less ambiguous.  All
you'd
> need pronouns for would be 'wir' and 'sie'(3rd pl/2nd sing, not 3rd sing).
> Why aren't they pro drop?
'kills him' could just as easily be with 'she' or 'it', so it's not
unambiguous.  Besides, even if it were, having only 3rd person singular as
pro-drop would be a strange discrepancy in a non-pro-drop system.

But that's modern English.  As you know, the older Germanic languages (and
some of the modern ones) are not ambiguous in any of the singular persons.
But in the plural, they generally share the same forms in at least 1st/3rd.
It would be possible for them to be pro-drop, they just aren't.  The level
of redundancy in a language isn't consistent from one to another.  Like how
we use a plural ending on nouns even with a number that makes it explicitly
plural.  Consider "lion", "lions", "three lions".  The first is singular, as
there is no marker.  The second is plural, as it has a plural marker.  The
third is plural, but it's redundantly marked by the number and the -s.
Welsh would say something more like "lion", "lions", "three lion", if I
recall correctly.

Redundancy serves a very useful purpose in language, helping to tie together
disparate elements into a coherent whole, but languages differ as to what
features they make redundant.  Pro-drop versus non-pro-drop is one of those
redundancy factors.

Joe

Reply