Pronoun Dropping in ChiShona: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

The issue of pronoun dropping has widely been established amongst Romance languages. While it is generally claimed that most morphologically agglutinative languages have pro-drop properties, there is a need to investigate and establish how different languages fair with this notion and note if there are any language peculiar idiosyncratic properties. This paper analyses pro-drop properties of the chiShona language, making comparisons to the well documented and prototypical pro-drop Italian language. The paper is largely comparative and descriptive in nature with Italian and English as our reference points for pro-dropping and non-pro-dropping respectively. Our findings are that chiShona is clearly a pro-drop language, characteristics of which tally with most properties that identify with this phenomenon in Italian. However, chiShona has its own idiosyncratic properties that differ from Italian, for instance the wh-word can freely occupy the position immediately after the complementizer and also the post sentential position without vitiating the intended questioning. The wh-word in chiShona has much free play to the extent of occupying the final position in the sentence. In terms of subject omission in weather verbs, the difference between chiShona and Italian is that in Italian, the existence of the subject pronoun makes the sentence ungrammatical whereas in chiShona it remains a grammatical option. Our findings support the pro-drop phenomenon as a universal language parameter that however exhibit language internal idiosyncratic differences.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.23.5510