Pro drop and pronouns
Ad Neeleman, Kriszta Eszter Szendrői · 2005
The generalization that pro drop is conditioned by rich agreement allows for a very attractive theory that reduces variation in the syntax to variation in the lexicon. The central idea is that languages allow pro drop to the extent that their verbal agreement paradigm expresses the -features necessary for local recovery of the content of dropped arguments (see Taraldsen 1978, Rizzi 1986 among others). The generalization is mainly based on European languages. Richly inflected languages like Italian, Spanish and Greek allow subject drop, but English, Dutch and Swedish, which are poorly inflected, do not. An agreement-based theory of pro drop faces difficulties with languages like Japanese and Chinese, which lack agreement and nevertheless allow pro drop. In fact, pro drop in these languages seems to be more wide-spread than in Italian-type languages: any pronominal argument can be omitted. The literature refers to this phenomenon as ‘radical pro drop’, ‘rampant pro drop’, or, perhaps most frequently, ‘discourse pro drop’. It is illustrated below (Chinese data from Huang 1984: 533, 563): (1) a. ∅ siken-ni otita. Japanese exam-DAT failed ‘pro failed the exam.’ b. Bill-ga ∅ setokusuru