Hot answers tagged pronoun-dropping
14
This is due to a phenomenon that occurs in intimate conversational spoken English called "Conversational Deletion". It was discussed and exemplified quite thoroughly in a 1974 PhD dissertation in linguistics at the University of Michigan that I had the honor of directing.
Thrasher, Randolph H. Jr. 1974. Shouldn't Ignore These Strings: A Study of ...
14
It's not just pronouns that are getting dropped. It's whole chunks of sentences.
Will respond when received.
lacks not just its subject I, but also the subject it and the auxiliary verb is from when received. This is the written version of Conversational Deletion, a very common practice in speech, discussed here.
5
You can do this if being informal, especially in spoken English. Example:
Janet: Hey, Mike, what did you do today?
Mike: Ah well, you know, the usual. Did the dishes, fed the dog. Nothing extraordinary.
But to be formally correct, you need to include the personal pronoun:
The usual. I did the dishes, then I fed the dog.
When answering an ...
5
Yes, this was ordinary colloquial English in Shakespeare's day, although you was rapidly passing thou. Here are three more instances from Lear:
Art of this house?
Art not asham’d to look upon this beard?
What, art mad?
There was also a contracted form in the indicative:
As th’art a man, Give me the cup. —Ham
Well said; th’art a good fellow ...
3
The "implied" subject is a common feature of conversation and some writing, especially fiction (not necessarily limited to dialogue). Where the subject is clear, it is frequently omitted. This is a form of ellipsis.
Great. [For "That's great."]
Such a waste. [For "That is such a waste."]
Coming! [For "I'm coming."]
There are many more. In each ...
2
There's an article in Wikipedia on "Null-subject" languages. It includes a section on "pro-drop" languages. So one possible answer is "pro-drop". Chinese and Japanese both drop the subject and the subject pronoun.
In Japanese, if the subject is is the speaker, it's usually indicated as the topic -- "Watashi wa" ("wa" is a topic marker) -- of the sentence ...
1
The dropping of I (and other subject pronouns) in English is called “diary drop”, after one of the contexts in which it is most common.
It is distinct from pro-drop (mentioned by @BillFranke), in Italian and other “null subject languages”, in that it cannot occur, for instance, in subordinate clauses:
Think (that) I have understood
* Think (that) ...
1
The Principles and Parameters theory of languages might answer your question.
According to this theory, languages have certain parameters that can be either on or off position. The property you are asking about is known as the pro-drop (pronoun dropping) parameter. Spanish is pro-drop, but English isn't.
There is another parameter called verb attraction. ...
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