Open AccessExtending partial pro-drop in Modern Hebrew: A comprehensive analysis
Author(s) -
Nurit Melnik
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2007.11
Subject(s) - linguistics , verb , generalization , computer science , locality , hebrew , natural language processing , mathematics , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy , mathematical analysis
Modern Hebrew is considered to be a 'partial pro-drop language'. Traditionally, the distinctionbetween cases where pro-drop is licensed and those in which it is prohibited, was based on theperson and tense features of the verb: 1st and 2nd person pronominal subjects may be omitted inpast and future tense. This generalization, however, was found to be false in a number of papers,each discussing a subset of the data. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, dropped 3rd personpronouns subjects do occur in the language in particular contexts.Identifying these contexts by way of a corpus-based survey is the initial step taken in this study.Subsequently, a careful syntactic analysis of the data reveals broad generalizations which have notbeen made to date. Thus, what was initially assumed to be a uniform phenomenon of 3rd personpro-drop turns out to be manifested in three distinct types of constructions. Finally, the proposedHPSG-based analysis incorporates insights concerning locality, correlations between finite and non-finitecontrol, non-canonical elements, and binding.