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> English doesn't have pro drop Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragr
by bradrn 5y ago
> English doesn't have pro drop
Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragraph.)
> Second, there's more than just the subject missing in "Former emergency response driver...".
This is a good point; I did indeed miss this subtlety. (Actually, it’s not even very subtle!) In this case, I must admit to being unsure about how to analyse this.
- foldr 5y ago>Depends on the situation! For me it’s grammatical in most informal texts, e.g. emails. (Also, the first sentence of this paragraph.) This isn't technically pro drop. It's a different process called "diary drop". By coincidence I wrote a rant about this only a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127035
- bradrn 5y agoHuh, interesting — thanks for the pointer! I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Do you happen to have any more resources? (I enjoy linguistics, but haven’t really read much about syntax; my favourite topic is morphosyntactic alignment.)
- foldr 5y agoIt’s hard to find any good scholarly references on the differences between pro drop and diary drop (I guess because they are uncontroversial and not particularly subtle). However, section 4.2.1 of this MA dissertation has a decent, though very brief, summary: https://awweir.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/weir-ug-diss.pdf https://awweir.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/weir-ug-diss.pdf Similar observations are also made in the following paper: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76381796.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/76381796.pdf
- bradrn 5y agoAgain, thanks! I’ll read through these when I get some time.