From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs; was: Re: SVO / VSO
Date: 6 Oct 92 13:08:12 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <10931@hogg.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
> In article <1992Oct3.074936.3503@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>In article <2ACD2B6C.12513@news.service.uci.edu>, cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>>> A case can be made that in Spanish, for example, the pronoun is actually
>>> part of the morpheme that gets stuck on the end in the conjugation.
>>
>>I'm not sure what you mean.  I hope you're not trying to say that Spanish
>>_llover_ acquires an empty subject pronoun as we do and then attaches
>>the thing to the verb.
> 
> Why not?  If the inflected verb form in Spanish is treated as a
> verb-subject complex, and the person/number ending is a pronominal
> element, then this is just a case of an empty pronoun.

Both of your "if"s are rather debatable, aren't they?  The first is surely
awkward when we consider sentences with an overt subject.  Verb agreement
still applies!  The second stumbles over exactly the same point.  While
I'm aware of such things as French _Moi, je voudrais..._, your proposal
would require positing double subjects in sentences which don't have
sentences like the French example.  That seems like overkill.

>>But it can hardly be coincidental that a language with zero
>>subject anaphora will precisely permit zero-subject, as in _llueve_.
> 
> Is that correlation universal, though?  (I wish I hadn't forgotten
> all of my Icelandic, but it seems I have.)

Sorry, I can't help you on either point.  As for correlation: I was
only trying to say that dummy subjects are unlikely to be found in
langugages lacking the mandatory-subject-no-matter-what compulsion
that we labor under in English.

>>By the way: if 3.sg. pronouns are suffixed to the verb, as you say,
>>where do they appear?  The 3.sg. ending in most tenses is Null!
> 
> Which is as good a morpheme as any other, given that it is in opposition
> with morphemes with phonetic content.

We've disagreed on this before.  I still dislike morphemes which lack
phonetic realization under any circumstances, and that is true of the
proposed Spanish 3.sg. present etc. ending.  (The preterite -o is,
of course, not the same morpheme.)

> In any case, if a null morpheme is not a morpheme, then why is Spanish
> not substantially different from, say, Latin, where the 3Sg ending is
> _-t_?  The two are pro-drop to the same degree; the nullhood of the
> Spanish ending doesn't appear to make a difference.

Nor should it, as long as the vast majority of Spanish verb forms are
not morphologically ambiguous.
 
I've never been comfortable with the notion that "pro-drop" is a signifi-
cant criterion for classifying languages, though I must admit that I have
never studied the phenomenon.  But it struck me the other day that some
languages pro-drop even when the lost information is not recoverable from
the morphology or syntax.  In particular, Latin drops not only subjects,
but (with distressing frequency) direct objects, though these leave no
morphological or syntactic trace.  Japanese and many other languages
prodrop any NP recoverable from context, yet lack any verb agreement
in the normal sense (Japanese honorific doesn't count; it's too limited
to be of use here).  And for that matter, what about English?

	Going to the concert tonight? -- Can't.  Have to leave for
	Washington at five.  

It's undeniably true that prodrop -- or better, zero anaphora -- is
favored in languages with fairly complete verb agreement and disfavored
where this sort of morphology is minimal or lackinga.  But there are
too many counterexamples (e.g. German behaves approximately like English,
despite fairly complete verb agreement) for me to take the correlation
too seriously.

It also seems to me that the concern with whether Spanish verb endings
(or lack thereof) are actually pronominal elements reflects some parti-
cular facts about English, such as that we feel uncomfortable when we
see sentences like my examples in print.  If we think we need a pronoun,
then by gosh, so should every other right-thinking language, so they
must exist somewhere, n'est-ce pas?

--Leo Connolly