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Pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where pronouns can be elided (deleted) when considered unnecessary or redundant by the speaker.
In everyday speech there are often instances when it is obvious who or what is being referred to, or it can be guessed from context. In a pro-drop language, the pronouns that would normally take the place of those referents can be elided once the context has been established. Among major languages, the prototype of pro-drop languages is probably Japanese (featuring pronoun elision not only for subjects, as is often implied, but for practically all grammatical contexts), but Romance languages such as Spanish , Italian and Romanian are also pro-drop.
Examples
Consider the following examples from Japanese:
- Kono keeki wa oishii. Dare ga tsukutta no?
- this cake TOPIC tasty. who SUBJECT make-PAST QUESTION
- "This cake is tasty. Who made it?"
- Wakaranai. Watashi mo suki!
- know-NEGATIVE. I too pleasant
- "I don't know. I like it too."
The pronouns in bold in the English translations ("it" in the first line, "I" and "it" in the second) appear nowhere in the Japanese sentences, but are understood from context. They could be mentioned and the sentences would be grammatically correct, but not natural (learners of Japanese as a second language, especially those whose first language is non-pro-drop like English, often make the mistake of repeating the personal pronouns where it would be OK to drop them).
English deletes subject pronouns in some restricted contexts (Got it?, Makes sense., Feels OK to me., Found it.), but those can be interpreted as informal shortcuts rather than fully grammatical propositions.
Spanish , Italian and Romanian can elide subject pronouns only, and they often do even when the referent has not been mentioned, but this is helped by the fact that verbs in these three languages have a person/number inflection.
Impersonal constructions
In some cases (impersonal constructions), a proposition has no referent at all. Pro-drop languages deal naturally with these, where non-pro-drop languages such as English sometimes have to fill in the syntactic gap by inserting a dummy pronoun.
- English: It is snowing.
- French: Il pleut. ("It rains").
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