Search

Pro-drop is an abbreviation for ‘pronoun dropping’. It describes a feature of some languages that do not require an overt argument, especially a subject, to be present in a clause. That is, whereas English is not a pro-drop language and thus requires a subject noun or pronoun in a finite verbal clause like He has spoken, in Italian the overt subject may be ‘dropped’, e.g., Ha parlato ‘(He) has spoken’. Languages that allow pro-drop fall into three general categories (see Huang 1984; also Dryer 2008): those that allow pro-drop only in restricted environments (e.g.,…

The ‘relative clause’ (RC) is the primary strategy for modifying a nominal constituent (i.e., the relative head) with a clause-level constituent (1). The RC thus contrasts both with non-clause-level nominal modifiers, such as Noun Phrase (NP)-internal prepositional phrases (PP) (2), and with clause-level modifiers of verbs, such as temporal, causal, and complement clauses (3). (1) RC (clausal modifier of a nominal head): אָֽנֹכִי֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֧ר הוֹצֵאתִ֛יךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרַ֖יִם מִבֵּ֣י֥ת עֲבָדִֽ֑ים ʾå̄nōḵī YHWH ʾε̆lōhεḵå̄ʾå̆šεr hōṣēṯīḵå̄ mē-ʾεrεṣ miṣrayim mi…

‘Clitic’ (from Greek κλίνειν ‘incline, lean’) is the term in traditional grammar for a word that cannot bear primary word stress and thus ‘leans’ on an adjacent stress-bearing word (the ‘clitic host’). A clitic leaning on a following word is a ‘proclitic’; one leaning on a preceding word is an ‘enclitic’. Clitics exhibit characteristics of both words and affixes and yet do not fall fully into either category: they are “like single-word syntactic constituents in that they function as heads, argum…