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The subject "(s)he" of the second sentence is only implied in Italian. English and French, on the other hand, require an explicit subject in this sentence.. Null-subject languages include Arabic, most Romance languages, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, the Indo-Aryan languages, Japanese, Korean, Persian, the Slavic languages, Tamil, and the Turkic languages.
Null-subject languages, such as Chinese and Italian, allow the omission of an explicit subject in an independent clause by replacing it with a null subject. This is unlike languages like English or French which require an explicit subject in this sentence. This phenomenon is similar, but not identical, to that of pro-drop languages, which may ...
Languages known as pro-drop or null-subject languages do not require clauses to have an overt subject when the subject is easily inferred, meaning that a verb can appear alone. [2] However, non-null-subject languages such as English require a pronounced subject in order for a sentence to be grammatical. This means that the avalency of a verb is ...
In pronoun-dropping languages, including null subject languages such as most Romance languages, the zero pronoun is a prominent feature. A zero subordinate conjunction occurs in English in sentences like I know ∅ he likes me, in which the zero conjunction plays the role of the subordinate conjunction that in I know that he likes me.
English is not a "pro-drop" (specifically, null-subject) language – that is, unlike some languages, English requires that the subject of a clause always be expressed explicitly, even if it can be deduced from the form of the verb and the context, and even if it has no meaningful referent, as in the sentence It is raining, where the subject it ...
It is regarded as semantically null or a placeholder. [2] Expletives are not insignificant or meaningless in all senses; they may be used to give emphasis or tone, to contribute to the meter in verse, or to indicate tense. [3] [4] The word "expletive" derives from the Latin word expletivus: serving to fill out or take up space. [5] [6]
Languages with partial pro-drop have both agreement and referential null subjects that are restricted with respect to their distribution. [14] The partial null-subject languages include most Balto-Slavic languages, which allow for the deletion of the subject pronoun. Hungarian allows deletion of both the subject and object pronouns.
The pro-drop (or ‘null subject’) parameter determines whether the subject of a clause can be suppressed. Determining the parametric values for given languages is known as parameter-setting. The overall approach has been called the principles and parameters theory (PPT) of universal grammar , and has since come to be applied outside of ...