Chapter 62: Expression of pronominal subjects
1. Person forms and zero anaphora ⇫ ¶
In this chapter we ask how subjects (agents of transitive verbs or single arguments of single-argument verbs) are expressed when they either refer to the speaker or hearer (‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, etc.) or to a third person referent that is activated in the hearer’s mind and hence need not be expressed by a full noun phrase. Overt forms used in such circumstances are called person forms (Siewierska 2004) or (more traditionally) personal pronouns. All languages have person forms, but not all languages necessarily use them in subject position, because their content can often be inferred from the context. When reference to the speaker or hearer or to a third person referent is intended and no overt form is used, we speak of zero anaphora.
Typical examples of overt subject person forms are given in (1), and typical examples of zero anaphora (marked by Ø in the text) are given in (2).
2. The values ⇫ ¶
The most prominent contrast for this feature is between languages with obligatory person forms in subject position (values 1-2) and languages with optional person forms (value 3, ex. 2). Within the languages with obligatory person forms, we can make a subdivision into languages with person forms that are words (value 1, ex. 1) and languages with person forms that are affixes (value 2, ex. 3 below). In addition, we distinguish two minor types (cf. §4 below). This feature, including the definition of the values, is based on Dryer (2005m).
 | Obligatory pronoun words | 49 |
 | Pronoun affixes | 4 |
 | Optional pronoun words | 18 |
 | Subject pronouns in different position | 2 |
 | Mixed behaviour of pronominal subjects | 3 |
| Representation: | 76 | |
The map shows a striking areal regularity: In the Atlantic region, all languages have obligatory subject pronouns, while in the Indian Ocean and in Asia, almost all languages have optional subject pronouns. The Pacific region (Australia and the Pacific islands) again tends to have obligatory pronouns. This is thus one of the features that show the clearest geographical patterning, and is thus most clearly due to substrate influence.
The West African substrate languages that have influenced the structure of Atlantic creoles show a very strong tendency to have obligatory subject pronoun words or affixes (Dryer 2005m, Creissels 2005). This explains that even the Portuguese-based creoles in the Atlantic have obligatory pronouns, although Portuguese (at least European Portuguese, in contrast to English and French) does not have obligatory pronouns. On the other hand, the languages of South and Southeast Asia tend to show optional pronouns, which is reflected in the Portuguese-based and Spanish-based creoles of the region as well as Chinese Pidgin English and Chinese Pidgin Russian, and the languages based on Malay. Why the French-based languages of the Indian Ocean pattern with the Asian languages is less clear. In the Pacific islands, the Austronesian languages tend to be like the African languages in requiring obligatory subject pronouns, so again the fact that Tok Pisin and Tayo have obligatory pronouns may be explainable by the substrate.
Affixal pronouns (value 2), which are always obligatory, are found only in those APiCS languages that are closely related to non-European languages with affixal pronouns, especially the mixed languages Michif, Media Lengua and Mixed Ma’a/Mbugu, but also in the Bantu-based Lingala. An example is (3).
(Affixal person forms are often called “agreement markers”, but we do not use this terminology, for the reasons given in Haspelmath 2013a+.)
It should be noted, however, that the distinction between affixal pronouns and pronoun words of the sort seen in (1a) and (1b) is difficult to draw. For example, French weak subject pronouns are written separately, but they have all the properties of prefixes (Miller 1992). Creissels (2005) notes that the same is true of West African languages: Weak subject pronouns are often written separately as in English or French, but really behave like prefixes. In general, making a distinction between affixes and clitics (dependent words that cannot occur on their own) is difficult (Haspelmath 2011b). And most of the languages with obligatory pronoun words in subject position (value 1) have special dependent person forms for the subject (values 2 and 4 of Chapter 17). Whether one describes these special dependent person forms as clitics or affixes is typically a matter of descriptive tradition, and not so much due to real differences.
Note also that our major distinction, between obligatory and optional pronouns, is rather different from another well-known distinction, between “pro-drop” (or “null-subject”) and “non-pro-drop” languages. The latter correspond roughly to our types 1 and 4, and the former can be seen as corresponding to type 2 and 3 (cf. Meyerhoff 2000), but we prefer not to use this terminology and this way of grouping the phenomena (see also Haspelmath 2013a+).
3. Distinguishing between optional and obligatory use ⇫ ¶
There are many intermediate cases between the two extremes of languages where person forms are always used and languages where they are never used in non-contrastive contexts. Almost all languages allow the omission of subject person forms in imperatives, and many allow their omission in coordinate structures.
The criterion for optionality (type 3) that we asked our contributors to adopt was whether or not person forms are omitted strikingly more often than in English. According to den Besten & Biberauer (2013), this is not the case in Afrikaans, for instance, even though this language allows the omission of the first person singular pronoun in the spoken language (Verstaan nie = Ek verstaan nie ‘I don’t understand’), but English is similar. For Berbice Dutch, Kouwenberg (2013a) argues that pronominal arguments cannot be considered optional, because they cannot be omitted in out-of-the-blue sentences, as would be the case in a pro-drop language, even though pronominal subjects are frequently omitted in discourse. This is probably the most extreme case, where a different decision would have been possible.
4. The minor types ⇫ ¶
In one of the minor types, the subject person form is in a different position than the full-NP subject (value 4). One example comes from Papiamentu, where weak person forms usually follow the modal particle lo (see 4a), but full-NP subjects precede it (see 4b).
In Eskimo Pidgin, pronoun subjects follow the verb (e.g. tuktu mȗkki ila [caribou kill he] ‘He killed the caribou’), but full-NP subjects precede it (e.g. wai'hinni artegi annahanna [woman coat sew] ‘The woman is sewing a coat’).
In the final type, first and second person subject forms behave differently from third person subject forms. In Singapore Bazaar Malay, first and second person pronouns are optional, but third person pronouns are obligatory:
In Bislama and Reunion Creole, we find the opposite situation, with first and second person pronouns occurring always, while third person pronouns are optional.