# Subject and Object Pronouns



## Sevance

This isn't as much of a language semantics question as it is a language history question.

Now obviously, pronouns are essential to a language. But why do languages (like English) have a different set of pronouns for subjects (I, he, we, etc.) and objects (me, him, us, etc.)? This may be a stupid question, but wouldn't a sentence such as "I call him" carry the same meaning as "I call he?" This would need some getting used to, of course, but that's only because we are already used to the two sets of pronouns. I know that languages like Persian don't have this dualism and use the same pronouns for objects and subjects.

So why doesn't English (or Spanish or most other languages)?

Using just one set would also actually clear up some ambiguity, too. No more frustrations over "Joe and me (I) went to...." or "Us (we) Americans are..." or "It is he (him)."


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## owlman5

Hi, Sevance.

I don't think you're likely to get a definitive answer to your question in here, but I'd say that using different pronouns for subjects and objects makes it easier for listeners to figure out who is doing what to whom.   I'd find sentences like "He gave it to he" confusing, wouldn't you?

To me, language rules are arbitrary customs that people have developed over the course of time.  I'm not widely familiar with the way different languages use pronouns, but the languages I'm familiar with - English, Spanish, and German - all distinguish between subject and object pronouns.


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## Hildy1

Hello Sevance.

As you say, it is a question of history. One could also ask why English nouns have the same form all the time. Centuries ago, English nouns also had different cases, that is, different forms depending on their function in the sentence. By the time of Chaucer, I believe, they had lost most of their case endings. Now there are none for English nouns and also for many pronouns (demonstrative, interrogative, etc.); but most personal pronouns (aside from "it") have case forms (the I/me, we/us etc that you mention).

If word order is strictly fixed, case form are not necessary. But I believe most European languages, until about a thousand or so years ago, had fairly free word order. So the different noun and pronoun forms were necessary. With free word order, people could make the same basic statement, with the same words, while expressing subtly different ideas by varying the word order.

In other words, if you assume that word order is fixed, then case forms are not essential. But someone who is used to free word order, and case forms, will ask why people are so restricted in the way they express themselves in languages like modern English.


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## berndf

Hildy1 said:


> But I believe most European languages, until about a thousand or so years ago, had fairly free word order. So the different noun and pronoun forms were necessary. With free word order, people could make the same basic statement, with the same words, while expressing subtly different ideas by varying the word order.


In languages that have retained a full case system this is still the case. E.g., in modern German one can say _Ich sah ihn_ (_I saw him_) and _Ihn sah ich_ (_him saw I_) depending on what you want to stress: *I *_[rather than somebody else]saw him _or that _I saw *him *[rather than somebody else]_, respectively. The only thing fixed is that the verb must be in the middle. This was essentially the syntax in Old English as well. In modern English, this old word order could occasionally be found in poetic texts at least until the Romantic Age; example: _Him saw I, sitting in an open square_ (William Wordsworth).

See also this thread.


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## jmx

Sevance said:


> Now obviously, pronouns are essential to a language.


Not necessarily. For instance, Japanese does have personal pronouns, but speakers use them rather sparingly. In Japanese, there are other alternative mechanisms to express which person (1st, 2nd or 3rd) is doing something to which other person.


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## rur1920

Hildy1 said:


> As you say, it is a question of history. One could also ask why English nouns have the same form all the time. Centuries ago, English nouns also had different cases, that is, different forms depending on their function in the sentence. By the time of Chaucer, I believe, they had lost most of their case endings. Now there are none for English nouns and also for many pronouns (demonstrative, interrogative, etc.); but most personal pronouns (aside from "it") have case forms (the I/me, we/us etc that you mention).
> 
> If word order is strictly fixed, case form are not necessary. But I believe most European languages, until about a thousand or so years ago, had fairly free word order. So the different noun and pronoun forms were necessary. With free word order, people could make the same basic statement, with the same words, while expressing subtly different ideas by varying the word order.





> As say you, a question of history is it. Also why the same form all the time has any English noun one ask could. Centuries ago, different cases also had English nouns, that is, different forms on their function in the sentence depending. By the time of Chaucer, I believe, they lost had of their case endings most. Now there are none for English nouns and for many pronouns also (demonstrative, interrogative, etc), but have case forms (the I/me, we/us etc that mention you) most personal pronouns (aside from "it").


I am very sorry, but saying that syntactically fixed word order and lacking case forms have any _causal_ relationships is plain silly. Once can have one of them without having the other; the two phenomena must have different, independent causes.


> With free word order, people could make the same basic statement, with  the same words, while expressing subtly different ideas by varying the  word order.


Not true. Subtlety involved is no less if you take a different word. There is no difference; ordering words differently has no lesser impact on the perceiver than choosing a different word. And impact is what matters. (By the way, my idea is that in English the word order became fixed clause-wise, because they in preceding centuries did not think, subconsciously, that impact is what matters). I am not talking about my artificial example, of course; there, different instances of word order only served the intention to demonstrate that a human mind has intense capabilities of guessing things, which turn useless the popular idea that language is a means to communicate information. The mind does not rely on any rules of encoding information, it can create new ones on the fly. Instead, language is a means to organise experience, available for making innumerable new guesses in the future.


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## Hulalessar

In languages such as English, French and Spanish which have abandoned cases for nouns I think that it is just that they have persisted - rather like the "-s" in English for the third person singular present tense. In each of these languages some of the forms are the same for subject and object pronouns e.g. you and it; vous and nous; and usted. No confusion arises in those cases and I cannot see that it would if all object pronouns disappeared.

It is something of a curiosity that in English someone who would never say "Me went" or "He gave to it I" may say "John and me went" and "He gave it to John and I". The "and" seems to have a strong disruptive influence! It can be noted that in French for some persons a special disjunctive form of the pronoun is needed in such situations where English speakers do not follow standard English: "Je suis allé" but "Jean et moi sommes allés" and "Il me l'a donné" but "Il l'a donné à Jean et moi".


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## rur1920

owlman5 said:


> I don't think you're likely to get a definitive answer to your question in here, but I'd say that using different pronouns for subjects and objects makes it easier for listeners to figure out who is doing what to whom.   I'd find sentences like "He gave it to he" confusing, wouldn't you?


You probably would, because you are used to these words as they are, but I would not.


rur1920 said:


> There is no difference; ordering words differently has no lesser impact on the perceiver than choosing a different word. And impact is what matters.


By the way: I cannot express my intense feeling of surprize when I found out for myself, comparing different simple sentences, that relationships among things, which relationships result to be expressed by clauses with the same words, are usually (not always, though) exactly the same. That conclusion was absolutely counter-intuitive! Later I explained it to myself in the following way: depending on the first words of the expression, very different is the mental context ( ;-) ) in which I put the meaning of these words, so I internally work on this meaning differently, which causes of course different sensation as well.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> I am very sorry, but saying that syntactically fixed word order and lacking case forms have any _causal_ relationships is plain silly. Once can have one of them without having the other; the two phenomena must have different, independent causes.


There is much debate about the precise mechanism but few linguists (actually, I cannot think about any right now) doubt that there is a causal relationship between the loss of inflections (cause), both declensions and conjugations, in English and the grandual shift (effect) from the more liberal Germanic V2 word order of Old English to the stricter SVO word order in modern English. You are very welcome to present arguments against it but summarily dismissing this theory as "plain silly" is presumptuous and intolerable.


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## rur1920

Sorry, a _cause_ is what works always and under any imagineable circumstances. Yet I succeeded in making an understandable pseudo-English text with free word order. What other argumentation may be needed? Free word order in a language with no case marking does not harm understanding. Therefore, there is no mechanism to make these two phenomena _in general_ related. They may be related in specific cases, then one ought to find out a _cause_ why they happened to be related, if one really seeks causal knowledge.


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## Gavril

In some respects, Modern English subject pronouns are more like "subject-affixes" than independent pronouns: the only consistently independent pronouns seem to be _me_/_you_/_him_/_her_/_us_/_them_, i.e. the so-called object pronouns (except _you_, which works for subject and object).

For example, in spoken language, you rarely hear people say "It wasn't *I* who spoke to him" -- instead, you would hear "It wasn't *me*". Or, for example, you wouldn't hear someone say "Let's introduce ourselves separately: first you, then *I*".

Instead, _I/he/she/we/they_ mainly seem to be used when they are directly adjacent to a verb (at least in the spoken language), making them more like conjugational affixes: for example, "I wrote" could be seen as the "1st person singular preterite" of _to write_, or "did I" could be seen as the "1 sg. past tense interrogative" of _to do_.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> Sorry, a _cause_ is what works always and under any imagineable circumstances. Yet I succeeded in making an understandable pseudo-English text with free word order. What other argumentation may be needed? Free word order in a language with no case marking does not harm understanding. Therefore, there is no mechanism to make these two phenomena _in general_ related. They may be related in specific cases, then one ought to find out a _cause_ why they happened to be related, if one really seeks causal knowledge.


It is sufficient to demonstrate that the loss of inflections causes sufficiently many additional ambiguities to make V2 word order impractical compared to SVO word order to give plausibly to the theory. Giving some examples of sentences that remain intelligible when you change word order in a way that violates SVO isn't a valid counter argument.

Plausibly is of course not proof and you have to analyse the actual development in detail to come to conclusions. Yet plausibly is sufficient to reject your summary dismissal of the theory.


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## rur1920

Edwin Pulleyblank, "Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar".
From Chapter 2.3 ("Some Basic Principles of Classical Chinese Syntax" => "Word Order"). Emphasis is mine.


> The basic rules of word order in Classical, as well as Modern, Chinese, are: (a) the subject precedes the predicate, (b) a modifier (adjective, possessive noun, relative clause, adverb) precedes the word it modifies, (c) the verb precedes its object. All these rules have certain exceptions, as follows:
> (a) The normal subject-predicate order is inverted in exclamatory sentences.
> (b) The object of a verb, or some other post-verbal element, may be placed in exposed position in front for purposes of topicalization, contrast, or emphasis.
> (c) In certain cases pronoun objects precede the verb in Classical Chinese even when not exposed. Two rules which apply throughout the classical period are: (i) interrogative pronoun objects precede the verb; and (ii) when a verb is negated, unstressed personal pronouns are placed between the negated particle and the verb.


Yet, you cannot negate that Classical Chinese had no inflections. I underlined those purposes for switching the order that involve no unambiguous syntactic or semantic reason. Whether (a) has one, I am unsure.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> It is sufficient to demonstrate that the loss of inflections causes sufficiently many additional ambiguities to make V2 word order impractical compared to SVO word order to give plausibly to the theory.


What is impractical cannot be evaluated from counting additional ambiguities. It is a matter of approach rather than knowledge. Some would say it is practical to use a nail, while others would prefer a screw. Given that the mind is able to make guesses, it may resolve ambiguities in one mode (with fixed syntax), and function when there are none in another (with free syntax).


> Yet plausibly is sufficient to reject your summary dismissal of the theory.


Of what theory? I dismissed the mode of thinking, actually, rather than any specific theory. From "this language has no inflections" that "this language _must_ have syntactically fixed word order" it does not follow. Same, by the way, with the argument from "this language does not mark the grammatical person in the verb" to "this language _must_ use subject pronouns always when no actual subject noun is used". Incidentally, some actual counter-examples are available for the latter argument, not only this abstract reasoning which says the two cases are causally unrelated.


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## berndf

Gavril said:


> In some respects, Modern English subject pronouns are more like "subject-affixes" than independent pronouns: the only consistently independent pronouns seem to be _me_/_you_/_him_/_her_/_us_/_them_, i.e. the so-called object pronouns (except _you_, which works for subject and object).
> 
> For example, in spoken language, you rarely hear people say "I wasn't *I* who spoke to him" -- instead, you would hear "It wasn't *me*". Or, for example, you wouldn't hear someone say "Let's introduce ourselves separately: first you, then *I*".
> 
> Instead, _I/he/she/we/they_ mainly seem to be used when they are directly adjacent to a verb (at least in the spoken language), making them more like conjugational affixes: for example, "I wrote" could be seen as the "1st person singular preterite" of _to write_, or "did I" could be seen as the "1 sg. past tense interrogative" of _to do_.


It is indeed so that the oblique forms of the personal pronouns have become the base/stand alone forms and the nominative pronouns are the ones that are used in particular contexts only. It is likely that future development staged, if the do away with the two series of pronouns altogether, will abandoned the nominative and not the oblique series. For the 2nd plural this has already happened (you replaced ye) and in dialects that still use it in ordinary speech also for the 2nd singular (thee replacing thou).

For relative and demonstrative pronouns things are different. There the nominative forms have won/are winning. That and which have lost their oblique forms already long ago and who is currently in the process following suit (sentences like "This is the man who I saw" are becoming acceptable).


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## rur1920

A larger example of an artifical language similar to English with no syntactic bound on the word order ("free word order"), no syntactic bound on use or non-use of subject pronouns ("pro-drop"), yet clear meaning.


> Recalling memories of the past day, mixing thoughts of the future and of the timeless, following a large street was John Smith. Was Tuesday, June 26th, but recalled the conversation at 25th, when still worked as a Seeker. Not too bad seemed yet a Story: having, apparently, to meet by office of job Mary Williams, instructed workman Joshua Parkings to follow her path. Of the latter's account had to narrate to the boss, here is what came to be.
> 
> "The Weirddoer, she implied her essence clearly?"
> "Not really, Mr Steppins. We could not know whether those crows were artificial or not; needed to know more. Sent been having, did not have to meet her and narrate agenda, in the streets had to learn what had to with birds do first, and only then ask whether would join investigation. My decision was not approved by Mr. Parkings, and argued with me for a while, but went, because, whatever told the feeling, there was no proof. Seemed to be no proof."
> "Her found, right?"
> "At the expected place, sir".
> "So then?"
> "Missed her. Very fast was walking, utilised of people crowds to get oneself out of reach, so to pursue was not able. Seemed learnt of our curiosity somehow and not was happy at that, and while pursuing noticed the crows grey were there, more than the usual number, of what to mention proceeded in the report when returned. Counted eight, fifty, and five at Verison, Gathering, and Newsquare. Lost he in Johansson's Square, remained no sight of her, apparently a bus used as they were many, while new came and went every minute".
> 
> That was our job, crow-counting on the field! (So had to recall and perhaps did Mr. Sight). At us the Weirddoer must have laughed admittedly, from one mystery into another launching us. Still cannot tell what did with consciousness of our desperate attempts to get picture of the reasons for actions, and what was her natural order of action, or maybe laughed at and naturally acted at the same time sometimes. Anyway, that weird, weird story is for me gone, though is still not gone for the factories. Production to stop had... That's what all knew from newspapers, but workers, managers! Of them the accounts were not, was easy to silence because no-one managed to understand what was unusual, or was anything indeed. In someway subtly were terrified, and God knows what were made to want at those weird, weird days, when turned the Crowflock upside down the hearts in the plants. A failure of the main engine (must have recalled the told widely pretext for switching off), end of Story, no knowledge still.
> 
> And so, misfortuned and conquered, he was walking along the street. There was no reason to be happy, but happiness is reasonless.


I would not want to make larger examples in order not to annoy you all and me.


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## Gavril

For what it's worth, I didn't immediately understand all of that text (e.g. I am still trying to parse "_of what to mention proceeded in the report when returned_").


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> What is impractical cannot be evaluated from counting additional ambiguities. It is a matter of approach rather than knowledge. Some would say it is practical to use a nail, while others would prefer a screw. Given that the mind is able to make guesses, it may resolve ambiguities in one mode (with fixed syntax), and function when there are none in another (with free syntax).


I find it difficult to make sense of that statement. It is much to vague and much to general. But if you want an example of an impractical systax than take your text in #16 which is a pain to read.


rur1920 said:


> Of what theory? I dismissed the mode of thinking, actually, rather than any specific theory. From "this language has no inflections" that "this language _must_ have syntactically fixed word order" it does not follow.


Nobody here made such a bold claim. I don't see whom you are fighting. Hildy's observations were rather specifically about the interaction of decaying case systems and loss of freedom in word order in European languages and about the specific IE case system.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> For what it's worth, I didn't immediately understand all of that text (e.g. I am still trying to parse "_of what to mention proceeded in the report when returned_").


Sorry. I forgot that "mention" takes a direct object ("what") rather  than an indirect one ("of what"). If you understood the rest eventually,  I take it that imaginary native speakers of this  artificial language could understand it immediately.


berndf said:


> Nobody here made such a bold claim. I don't see  whom you are fighting. Hildy's observations were rather specifically  about the interaction of decaying case systems and loss of freedom in  word order in European languages and about the specific IE case  system.


No-one in person. 


berndf said:


> But if you want an example of an impractical systax than take your text in #16 which is a pain to read.


Just because you are not used to it.  Otherwise, it may be quite practical. (I actually reiterated what I said in the post you quoted in simpler terms).


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## rur1920

Okay, Classical Chinese mentioned, what follows? Bulgarian, a language with grammatical number, but no grammatical case. Let us use Google. Apparently, Bulgarians would also disagree with naive (no value intended and no attribution intended!) notions of being practical. From a description of the book by "Word Order in the Simple Bulgarian Sentence: A Study in Grammar, Semantics, and Pragmatics":


> Contemporary written Bulgarian tends to be [S-V-O] in structure ― over two thirds (66.8%) of the sentences sampled by the author. Despite the loss of its case system, spoken Bulgarian displays greater flexibility of word order than does written Bulgarian. This is explained by the presence in speech of certain oral mechanisms ― logical (rhematic) stress, pronominal reprise ― which help to discern (semantically and grammatically) the functions of primary sentence elements.


So strange being this "despite", there is actually an additional explanation that also works in Russian to explain the same phenomenon: in spoken, one does not have to create sentences that are universally understandable, meaning understandable by anyone and in any circumstances. Instead, one has huge "greater context" to rely on while talking to the partner and be understood by him or at least by oneself.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> Sorry. I forgot that "mention" takes a direct object ("what") rather  than an indirect one ("of what"). If you understood the rest eventually,  I take it that imaginary native speakers of this  artificial language could understand it immediately.



Even without the "of", I'm not sure about the meaning of this clause. I read through the whole text, and there are at least seven more clauses/sentences I'm still struggling with. And these are just the sentences to which I can't assign a clear subject or object -- the meaning of the text as a whole is still pretty opaque to me, though it seems to involve a woman who is being pursued.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> No-one in person.


Attacking foes that don't exist seems to be a futile endeavour to me.


rur1920 said:


> Just because you are not used to it.  Otherwise, it may be quite practical. (I actually reiterated what I said in the post you quoted in simpler terms).


Either you had a specific alternative syntax in mind when you wrote this text, then it is really only a matter of getting used to it but then also your argument breaks down.

Or this are just an ad-hoc deviations from standard syntax but then there is nothing to get habituated to.

At any rate, you tried to demonstrate to us that deviation from common English sytax rules does not render the language impractical. With this example, you certainly did not succeed.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> Either you had a specific alternative syntax in mind when you wrote this text, then it is really only a matter of getting used to it but then also your argument breaks down.
> Or this are just an ad-hoc deviations from standard syntax but then there is nothing to get habituated to.


I did not have any. That does not mean there is nothing to get used to. A language as a whole does not have tough rules, yet we get used to the language. Apparently, the thing that we must get used to is not _how language is organised to communicate information_, but _how to do language in practice_, that is _how to deal with experience we receive in order to change our knowledge_; the rules should concern the _process_ of using a language, not the _picture_ of how a language is constructed. As to my example, Gavril says he is concerned with lack of some pronouns, he does not say he is concerned with the word order, which was one part of the claim. Also, recall what we mentioned about Bulgarian and Classical Chinese; the former is no less restricted in nominal inflection than English is, and the second was even more than English so.


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## fdb

Classical Arabic has a full system of cases (nominative, genitive, accusative) and, at the same time, a very rigidly fixed word order. The same is the case in Akkadian.


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## Gavril

fdb said:


> Classical Arabic has a full system of cases (nominative, genitive, accusative) and, at the same time, a very rigidly fixed word order. The same is the case in Akkadian.



Do case endings remain in any spoken forms of Arabic?

A while ago, I remember hearing a theory that Classical Arabic was written by people whose everyday spoken language had already lost case endings (in other words, Classical Arabic was an archaic register even at the start of its written history). If there is any truth to this idea, then maybe the rigidity of the word order in Classical Arabic was influenced by the rigid word order in the speech of the people writing it.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> Attacking foes that don't exist seems to be a futile endeavour to me.





rur1920 said:


> I dismissed the mode of thinking, actually, rather than any specific theory. From "this language has no inflections" that "this language _must_ have syntactically fixed word order" …


In a way, I was fighting myself, maybe. The quoted idea is, on appearance, so plausible and "correct", and yet so wrong in reality, that it needs "resistance". Perhaps I should not have done this resistance in public. I have the impression however that very often this idea is somehow presumed. The very notion of "necessary" implies such wrong ways of thinking.


Hildy1 said:


> If word order is strictly fixed, case form are not necessary.


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## fdb

Gavril said:


> Do case endings remain in any spoken forms of Arabic?



No.




Gavril said:


> A while ago, I remember hearing a theory that Classical Arabic was written by people whose everyday spoken language had already lost case endings



This is certainly not the case with the pre-Islamic poets. And I did mention Akkadian as well.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> […] the meaning of the text as a whole is still pretty opaque to me […]





rur1920 said:


> Apparently, the thing that we must get used to is not _how language is organised to communicate information_, but _how to do language in practice_, that is _how to deal with experience we receive in order to change our knowledge_; the rules should concern the _process_ of using a language, not the _picture_ of how a language is constructed.


I am not sure that you followed the right process when deciphering. The right process was not to search logically which subject needs be inserted, but the following: insert the subject that you are caused to think of by the words of the context. Most often that means that the subject continues to be what was the subject right before; but there are also other kinds of influence on the thinker. For example, the first paragraph causes to think of the main character, John Smith; therefore, "instructed" applies to him. "Sent been having" causes to think of who had been sent, therefore "did not have to meet" applies to who was instructed (i.e. sent). And so on; all in all, I think I had copied the Russian mode of "subject recovery", so to say. Did that make anything more clear? I think that this process is what one might get habituated to.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> I am not sure that you followed the right process when deciphering. The right process was not to search logically which subject needs be inserted, but the following: insert the subject that you are caused to think of by the words of the context.



I don't understand the distinction you're drawing here. There were many cases where the context caused me to think of more than one possible subject or object, and these possibilities did not automatically "resolve themselves" into clarity. 

For example, "Not too bad seemed yet a Story" = a story still didn't seem like such a bad idea? To whom? Who is telling/writing the story? Why "yet"?

Perhaps, if I examined the first two sentences for long enough, the answers to these questions would become clearer to me, but that is an unusually long time to spend on a single sentence that is (allegedly) written in my native language.

PS -- if I'm not mistaken, Russian has clear personal suffixes (I/you/he/etc.) on non-past-tense verbs, and clear gender/number suffixes on past-tense verbs. I would think that this makes it problematic (at best) to use Russian methods of subject recovery with a language that lacks almost all the aforementioned markers.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> For example, "Not too bad seemed yet a Story" = a story still didn't seem like such a bad idea? To whom? Who is telling/writing the story? Why "yet"?


Apparently, I simply do not know English enough to know what words cause what kind of connotations. I seem to see that the meanings of words diverge in my text from the standard meanings in English even in some places where I could trace the difference; apparently, while writing the text, I was under idea "this is not English, so it must look like something else". "Story" meant "plot", i.e. how the actions had developed to that moment, specifically there how good or bad they looked to the protagonist; I used the indefinite article, because the protagonist did not yet know what kind of story it was. In order to make a good test, I apparently would have to be a native writer of English, which I cannot be. Sorry.


> Perhaps, if I examined the first two sentences for long enough, the answers to these questions would become clearer to me, but that is an unusually long time to spend on a single sentence that is (allegedly) written in my native language.


No, it is not, and it was not intended to be written in your native language. I explicitly called the language of this test "an artificial language". ;-)


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> PS -- if I'm not mistaken, Russian has clear personal suffixes (I/you/he/etc.) on non-past-tense verbs, and clear gender/number suffixes on past-tense verbs. I would think that this makes it problematic (at best) to use Russian methods of subject recovery with a language that lacks almost all the aforementioned markers.


Russian does have these, but it happens in a usual way that subject recovery works even when these markers don't. To think further, knowing the grammatical person does not help a lot with knowing the subject (if this is the third person), one still has to guess. With all this, learning how the markers work does not help to know how the resolution works; please see the examples of pro-drop languages with no such markers in the Wikipedia link that I gave in #14 (for convenience, here I repeat it). It seems that learning how these markers come to be and learning how this resolution comes to be are two studies with no inherent link.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> To think further, knowing the grammatical person  does not help a lot with knowing the subject (if this is the third  person), one still has to guess. With all this, learning how the markers  work does not help to know how the resolution works; please see the  examples of pro-drop languages with no such markers in the Wikipedia  link that I gave in #14 (for convenience, here I repeat it).



How do we know that resolution necessarily takes place in languages where there is no subject marking?

For  example, if Japanese has no subject marking on the verb, doesn't  normally use subject pronouns, and doesn't always compensate for these  absences by (for example) repeating the subject noun, this suggests that  the subject can be left ambiguous in contexts where the speaker doesn't  see a need to specify it, just as English speakers can (for example)  leave the possessor of a noun unspecified if they don't think this is  relevant information.



> It seems that learning how these  markers come to be and learning how this resolution comes to be are two  studies with no inherent link.



If the speakers of a language expect to be able to assign a subject  to any given verb, then I think you will see regular mechanisms (=  markers) in their language for indicating the subject, and new mechanisms that  spring up for this purpose when older ones are weakened (for example:  loss of verb endings through sound change > more rigid word order).

The absence of such mechanisms suggests that speakers don't expect to be able to resolve the subject of every given verb, at least not when it isn't important to do so.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> The absence of such mechanisms suggests that speakers don't expect to be able to resolve the subject of every given verb, at least not when it isn't important to do so.


That is more or less what I mean. Then, the speakers' expectations could be studied independently of studying how these expectations (what is expected to be always said explicitly) were fulfilled in practice while the language existed, couldn't they? And still, I think that the Japanese know who participates in an action that is expressed, otherwise both thinking out loud and communicating to other speakers makes no sense. By a 'subject' I did not mean the word, I meant the meaning, an implied concept or an implied family of concepts. In a sentence "wrote a book" you may guess that this is a human who directed this action, or say that this is a writing computer if the context is futuristic, and then the flow of thoughts in your head that is directed both by the outer world (if you engage in a conversation) and by the words you just read or heard (if you read a book or again if you engage in a conversation) may even install you into the path of thinking what kind of human that was or even who exactly that was.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> If the speakers of a language expect to be able to assign a subject  to any given verb, then I think you will see regular mechanisms (=  markers) in their language for indicating the subject, and new mechanisms that  spring up for this purpose when older ones are weakened


On the other hand, if the speakers have a mechanism to express a certain meaning on a regular explicit basis (i.e. grammatically) via a means that, among other things, expresses this meaning, that does not mean that speakers of this language really need or expect this part of the meaning to be expressed regularly or that they continue to expect this meaning to be regularly expressed in the future… For example, in the past perfect tense in Old Russian the grammatical person was expressed via the verb "to be", yet nobody seems concerned per the fact that this verb went out of existence in that position, leaving only the participle in the place… Which raises the question what might govern such expectations, which are the real cause of these grammatical changes. I understand that this question is not easy to answer, so it might well evade attention for this reason, but to negate its existence and say that the cause is purely grammatical is… er… not wise.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> On the other hand, if the speakers have a mechanism to express a certain meaning on a regular explicit basis (i.e. grammatically) via a means that, among other things, expresses this meaning, that does not mean that speakers of this language really need or expect this part of the meaning to be expressed regularly or that they continue to expect this meaning to be regularly expressed in the future…



I think that if a language is set up so that any given verb has a clearly indicated subject, this will engender (in everyone who learns it as a first language) the expectation for this structure to be maintained over time, whether through word order or affixes. There is still the question of how the structure initially develops, but once it is in place, I think this pattern will apply.



> For example, in the past perfect tense in Old Russian the grammatical person was expressed via the verb "to be", yet nobody seems concerned per the fact that this verb went out of existence in that position, leaving only the participle in the place…



Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the increased use of subject pronouns ("ja skazal", etc.) compensate somewhat for the loss of the verb "to be" in this context?

For example, I just found a Russian-language news article with a paragraph that began "*Он* подчеркнул" = "*he* underlined"(?). It is very unlikely that (for example) Slovene would have used the pronoun "on" in this context, since Slovene still uses the verb "to be" in forming the past tense.


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## berndf

There are other pro-drop languages that lack person marking in some clause structures, like Latin and Hebrew. In these clauses the subject is mandatory. It Russian this is not the case yet subject pronouns are also often used to compensate for this loss of person marking. I think this example rather supports than weakens the theory that loss of on type of maker asserts pressure on a language to develop alternative ones.


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## fdb

Could you give us some examples ?


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## berndf

Of what? Hebrew and Latin clauses where subjects are mandatory? Basically all (or at least most) nominal clauses that lack finite verb forms. This includes participle clauses and in case of Hebrew this includes the present tense. Example: amarti - I said but ani omer(et) - I say.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> I think that if a language is set up so that any  given verb has a clearly indicated subject, this will engender (in  everyone who learns it as a first language) the expectation for this  structure to be maintained over time, whether through word order or  affixes.


This is one guess about the language user's expectations out of many.


> Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the increased use of subject  pronouns ("ja skazal", etc.) compensate somewhat for the loss of the  verb "to be" in this context?


Maybe and even probably (as you said, 'somewhat', i.e. to some extent,  and I can't say which feature of the verb 'je' needs compensation), but  my point is that this is not grammaticalised, unlike in English where  you use such pronouns even where they are clearly unnecessary (say, when  the subject of discussion is already established). Please don't get me  wrong: I do not struggle for impractical language, I only say that the  need for practicality does not need to be transmitted into grammatical  (regular, explicit, always-present…) features. It only does if the  speakers of the language feel it is natural for some reason to express  certain meanings regularly and have them grammatical. Even in that Russian  news-article (whatever it is), please see that this looks more like a  requirement of style, than a necessity: nobody expects that the news  article will say "I underlined" (the author of the article? why?) or  "you underlined" (how do they know what I'm doing?). If the subject  pronoun was used in all cases and everywhere, its use like that would be a grammatical  feature, but since it is not, its use or dis-use serves to express  certain shades of meaning, which change the perception of the text and  are thus considered a matter of style.


berndf said:


> It Russian this is not the case yet subject pronouns are also often used to compensate for this loss of person marking.


Let us see that we cannot (have no theoretical ground to) know _why_ they are used. Sometimes both the person marker and the subject pronoun is used. Sometimes neither is used. Sometimes one is used, the other not. That makes guess that they play different roles and have different purposes. Making communication of the message practical might be a reason _sometimes_, but this is clearly not _the_ reason for inserting a subject pronoun.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> Maybe and even probably (as you said,  'somewhat', i.e. to some extent,  and I can't say which feature of the  verb 'je' needs compensation), but  my point is that this is not  grammaticalised,



This is a wider issue than the topic of the thread, but I'm not convinced that any structural feature (in any language) is "grammaticalized" in the sense you seem to be using here.

For  example, in spoken English, you will sometimes hear verbs used without a  subject pronoun if a subject has been previously established:

_*He had* to leave early. *Said* that his wife called him home._

(Note that word order continues to play a role here: I really doubt that speakers who use sentences like the above will go further and start regularly mixing up their word order.)

So,  it's not that the use of subject pronouns is grammaticalized in English  but not in Russian; it is more likely that the use of these pronouns is  more frequent in English because they are more often needed for  clarity's sake in English than in Russian (with its full inflection of  the verb according to person, etc).



> Even in that Russian   news-article (whatever it is), please see that this looks more like a   requirement of style, than a necessity: nobody expects that the news   article will say "I underlined"



Maybe not in a news  article, but this potential ambiguity could come up in conversation, in  an interview, etc. Also, even in a news article, a subject pronoun like _*on*_ can serve to indicate that the subject is not another noun phrase in the same sentence, correct?


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> This is a wider issue than the topic of the thread, but I'm not convinced that any structural feature (in any language) is "grammaticalized" in the sense you seem to be using here.


I mostly have described the sense in I am using it here, save one tiny detail. I cannot consider a language as some abstract system with its own laws; instead, I think of a human who either makes a decision while choosing a word or listens to a phrase and observes how this phrase influences his thinking. A human, in such consideration, acts not per his will, (assuming a human's freedom of will is no better than assuming the God's freedom of will: both assumptions result in impossibility of studying anything), but per some laws of nature that drive the processes in his brain (partially sensed by our consciousness as thoughts, feelings, wishes, conditions, and so on) and result in certain thinking, acting, and speaking. So, the question 'what is the cause of using a certain form of speech?' equals the question 'what is the purpose that the human mind has been taught by its experience to follow when choosing this form of speech?'. Now, nothing in the nature requires that a natural apparatus behave rationally, yet we observe that to some extent (and only to some extent) people do; also we may formulate guesses on the question what purposes the mind follows when choosing a word form.

Let us take a very simple example. Он ничего не говорил, потому что не знал, как ему помочь. — He did not say anything because he did not know how to help him. In Russian, you can either insert the second pronoun or not do it, in all kinds of speech, and the subject is clear in the sentence. In English, as far as I know, this is not the case. So, the purpose of inserting the English pronoun does not seem to be either pragmatic (to let everyone know well enough what happened) or stylistic (to express certain shades of meaning by the positive choice between use and non-use the pronoun). Instead, this purpose is grammatical: I put the word there because the grammar requires me to, like it requires me in Russian to have all nominals in relevant cases (which I personally may even fail to do if I am tired) and to put a verb in a clause in a finite form rather than in the infinitive (which I may violate on purpose sometimes). That this purpose of making the choice seems to have become prevalent in English is what I called grammaticalisation, and what I listed (the feature's being regular, explicit, always-present) were indications that should have made think that the purpose of using the feature was this. Even in your example sentence, when you feel the pressure of grammar more strongly (for example, in an official speech), most likely you will insert back the redundant 'he' ("Mr. Smith, as you know, had to leave early tonight. [He] told [us] that [his] wife called [him] home; but that was not true!" — notice, by the way, that all words in brackets can be freely omitted with no loss to pragmatics).

As to what is the sake of using subject pronouns in Russian the way they are used, i.e., among other things, with lesser frequency than in English… My own observation is that a subject pronoun is inserted whenever "a new thought begins about a thing (whatever 'a thing' is in the mind's understanding) that is denoted by the grammatical subject", which is an imprecise formulation, but that is what I have. Therefore (if that is true), the subject pronoun marks (not in a sense of some hermetic theory, but in the strictly natural sense, by modifying the ways in which the listener's thought follows) the beginning of such thought, and therefore its use or non-use is a system and conveys a sense that is, by itself, independent from such pragmatic considerations. For example (from an interview, as you asked  ): «И выяснилось, что правительство и ЦБ оказались не готовы к четким мерам. Всё время опаздывали или вообще не делали, ещё с лета было очевидно, что нужно было допускать компании к валюте.» — «And it became clear that the government and the Central Bank were not ready to apply any specific measures. All the time (_no word here_) were too late or did not do at all, from summertime [it] was already obvious, that companies had to be given access to foreign currency [that the Bank possessed]» (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, from here). Here, они is not necessary, because the thought continues to be the same. Another example:

- Здравствуй, что случилось?
- Ты представляешь, не смог попасть в метро.
"Hello, what happened?"
"Guess what (literally: do you imagine), was not able to get in the train."

The question, of course, is why the person is too late or looks too hurried and nervous or something like that. Since he is already the subject of thought, "I" is not inserted. However, "you" was inserted, because there _is_ a new thought concerning the asker that is being presented: we started to consider his ability for imagination. "Представляешь, я не смог попасть в метро" is also a possible answer, and it might sound like I was preparing to tell the story how that happened.

In other words, I do not see that the logic of choice of whether to use a subject pronoun or not boils down to pragmatics, i.e. to making the statement clear enough (clear enough, because there is no sentence in a human language that is not understood through guess, not through strict logic, primarily and that is not open to wide interpretation, so one might only hope that the guesses would lead the listener or the reader to relatively good results). Therefore, I cannot agree that pragmatics _define_ this usage, are a sake or a cause of configurations that we have in different languages. First because the mind is flexible enough to serve pragmatic needs without using strict structures for them, second because use of the subject pronouns may also have other purposes.


> Maybe not in a news article, but this potential ambiguity could come up in conversation, in an interview, etc. Also, even in a news article, a subject pronoun like on can serve to indicate that the subject is not another noun phrase in the same sentence, correct?


Well, this verb usually applies to people. And it may be weird to apply it to oneself. That's not an universal rule, I think, but that is enough to form expectations. Of course, subject resolution of this kind would work on a case-by-case basis. Sorry for this long long post, but I thought there might also be some mutual misunderstanding.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> Let us take a very simple example. Он ничего не говорил, потому что не знал, как ему помочь. — He did not say anything because he  did not know how to help him. In Russian, you can either insert the  second pronoun or not do it, in all kinds of speech, and the subject is  clear in the sentence. In English, as far as I know, this is not the  case. *So*, the  purpose of inserting the English pronoun does not seem to be either  pragmatic (to let everyone know well enough what happened) or stylistic  (to express certain shades of meaning by the positive choice between use  and non-use the pronoun).



I do not agree with your "so" here -- i.e. I do not see how one thing follows from the other. The fact that your sentence is clear to Russian speakers without a subject pronoun doesn't mean that the corresponding English sentence will be clear without "he".



> That  this purpose of making the choice seems to have become prevalent in  English is what I called grammaticalisation, and what I listed (the  feature's being regular, explicit, always-present) were indications that  should have made think that the purpose of using the feature was this.  Even in your example sentence, when you feel the pressure of grammar  more strongly (for example, in an official speech), most likely you will  insert back the redundant 'he'



Sure, clarity is not the only  motivating factor in the use of subject pronouns: prescriptive pressure  makes this usage more frequent than it otherwise would be, and the  "momentum" of learned habits may also play a role. That doesn't mean  that the desire for clarity has no causal role in this, or that  it was not a major motivating factor in (for example) the increased use  of subject pronouns after the loss of personal endings and case endings  in early English.



> ("Mr. Smith, as you know, had to leave  early tonight. [He] told [us] that [his] wife called [him] home; but  that was not true!" — notice, by the way, that all words in brackets can be freely omitted with no loss to pragmatics).



No, they cannot. For example, "His wife called home" means something different from "His wife called him home".



> For example (from an interview, as you asked   ): «И выяснилось, что правительство и ЦБ оказались не готовы к четким  мерам. Всё время опаздывали или вообще не делали, ещё с лета было  очевидно, что нужно было допускать компании к валюте.» — «And it became  clear that the government and the Central Bank were not ready to apply  any specific measures. All the time (_no word here_) were too  late or did not do at all, from summertime [it] was already obvious,  that companies had to be given access to foreign currency [that the Bank  possessed]» (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, from here). Here, они is not necessary, because the thought continues to be the same.



Is  this interview at all concerned with "we" (i.e. a group that the  speaker belongs to) or with "you" (the group he is addressing)? If not,  then it seems fair to assume that "we"/"you" are not the subjects of the  verb -- i.e., this is the same sort of narrative context as a news  article where everything is reported in the 3rd person plural or  singular.

By the way, does Russian use 3rd person plural verb forms with impersonal meaning (as e.g. Slovene does)?



> - Здравствуй, что случилось?
> - Ты представляешь, не смог попасть в метро.
> "Hello, what happened?"
> "Guess what (literally: do you imagine), was not able to get in the train."



Colloquial  English wouldn't necessarily have a subject pronoun here either: a  sentence like "Wasn't able to get on the train" sounds fine in the right  context (though I would have to think more, or read up more on this topic, before I could confidently explain what the right context  is).


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> By the way, does Russian use 3rd person plural verb forms with impersonal meaning (as e.g. Slovene does)?


First, a quick answer to a quick question. Yes, it does; in school grammars, such clause is called неопределённо-личное односоставное предложение (indefinitely-personal one-part clause). But that is not the case in the quote. There, we have a couple of безличных односоставных предложений (impersonal one-part clauses) and one неполное двусоставное предложение с опущенным подлежащим (incomplete two-part clause with omitted subject). The "parts" in those names refer to the subject and the predicate (though the clause is not divided in precisely two segments in such analysis, because there is also some rest). I pointed you at the latter clause. Here is what the Russian Corporal Grammar (a project at rusgram.ru) has to say on indefinitely-personal clauses (the translation is mine, the original text is in the first paragraph of the link): «Indefinitely-personal clauses are a type of clauses, the main part of which is a predicate in the form of the third person, plural number, present or future tense, or in the form of plural number, past tense, that denotes an action or a state of a non-named personal (see "Animacy") subject.» There is no way to understand the quoted clause in this manner, because the subject of talking is being clear to the listener (that text is a transcript of a radio interview), and the listener has no cause to think of any other non-named body than those that he is currently thinking about, so he simply does not. That goes naturally, no pondering is necessary of the kind "an unnamed body makes no sense in this context". Or maybe there is some pondering of this kind, but it is so obvious that it goes without notice.

As to the other points and questions, please let me think more.


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> As to the other points and questions, please let me think more.



With all due respect, I think that this discussion has strayed too far off the original topic. I'd prefer not to continue discussing your theories about subject pronouns (and the like) until we can see how these theories stand up to systematic tests of some kind (comprehension tests, etc. -- perhaps someone has already done them).

If you have any more comments/corrections to what I said about the Russian interview quote, I would be glad to read them, but apart from that, I am ready to "call it a thread".


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## rur1920

First, a couple of notes.


Gavril said:


> That doesn't mean that the desire for clarity has no  causal role in this, or that it was not a major motivating factor in  (for example) the increased use of subject pronouns after the loss of  personal endings and case endings in early English.


That's what I suspected. We understand different things by "a cause".  For me, an influence of a cause cannot be reasonably conditioned by any  other factors than the cause itself: if the cause sometimes works and  sometimes does not, it is not a cause. So, the disagreement that spurred  this conversation is partly "linguistic": different understanding of  words.


Gavril said:


> No, they cannot. For example, "His wife called  home" means something different from "His wife called him home".


At least, dropping of "his" could easily have evolved, which raises the  question why it didn't happen such way in English (and why it did in  Russian). There is no grammatical difference that could make this word  more pragmatical (to avoid the word "necessary") in one language than in  the other in any context. Just in Russian you usually don't say whom  the thing belongs, and in English you do. That might be explained by the  fact that in English any nouns require a determiner, so a possessive  adjective is just one of them handy, but that is an explanation through  what needs an explanation in its own turn.

Now, to your question.


Gavril said:


> Is this interview at all concerned with "we"  (i.e. a group that the speaker belongs to) or with "you" (the group he  is addressing)? If not, then it seems fair to assume that "we"/"you" are  not the subjects of the verb -- i.e., this is the same sort of  narrative context as a news article where everything is reported in the  3rd person plural or singular.


I am not sure this is a right question. There are much more potential  subjects than just two, virtually any body in the country who might  possibly do such actions (be too late and avoid taking measures). Why is  guessing other bodies like those less likely or less worth  consideration than guessing these two bodies (actually, three: the third  one is the host)? Looks disproportional. However, for the sake of  answering your question: no, the discussion was not concerned with  finding out what either the interviewed one or the listeners had to do.  The topic of the discussion was personal opinion of the chief editor of  the newspaper about different economical and political issues, that he  shared to a Moscow talk radio station. What is most important, the topic  in the local context, as follows from the first quoted sentence, is the  actions of the Central Bank, so even if Mr. Remchukov complained  elsewhere how his newspaper was not good, say, with covering the  situation or influencing the public opinion, still "we" would feel  absolutely unlikely there. That is, of course, my impression.


Gavril said:


> I'd prefer not to continue discussing your  theories about subject pronouns (and the like) until we can see how  these theories stand up to systematic tests of some kind (comprehension  tests, etc. -- perhaps someone has already done them).


I was not proposing any theory, I merely meant to notice that the  statement "In Russian, use or non-use of subject pronouns is defined by  pragmatic considerations, that is by whether or not the reader or the  listener has enough information to decide who is the participant through  which the course of the action is defined: either because this  participant directs the course of the action himself or because the  action is directed in coordination with how it affects such  participant." [I sought  to avoid the word 'subject', which adds little  clarity and also some confusion] is false. Hence, use or non-use of  subject pronouns is defined by _something else_. What is that  something, I don't know. I already acknowledged that what I proposed was  an "imprecise formulation", which of course cannot be used as a  "theory". I only proposed it to aid imagination and help see how such  abstract _something else_ might or might not look like. Simply, in _the system of usage_  of these pronouns (in real life, literary texts, etc) I cannot see such  guiding role of pragmatism. Now, as to evolution of other languages, I  just don't see why pragmatic considerations _must_ have worked  the way that they did, removing in English pro-drop features into  colloquial language and fixing its word order; your guess that the  language user's expectations ought to be aimed, per some natural  considerations, at conservation of all parts of meaning that happened to  be regularly expressed in the past is, as I said, one guess out of  many.



rur1920 said:


> Here is what the Russian Corporal Grammar (a project at rusgram.ru) has to say  on indefinitely-personal clauses (the translation is mine, the original  text is in the first paragraph of the link): «Indefinitely-personal  clauses are a type of clauses, the main part of which is a predicate in  the form of the third person, plural number, present or future tense, or  in the form of plural number, past tense, that denotes an action or a  state of a non-named personal (see "Animacy") subject.»


In my translation, I forgot to add "or in the form of the conditional  mood" (actually, a kind of unreal mood: it is used equally both in "if"  and in "then" clauses, and also in standalone clauses of course). Sorry.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> That's what I suspected. We understand different things by "a cause". For me, an influence of a cause cannot be reasonably conditioned by any other factors than the cause itself: if the cause sometimes works and sometimes does not, it is not a cause. So, the disagreement that spurred this conversation is partly "linguistic": different understanding of words.


A cause can be conditioned and we might not fully know these conditions ("hidden parameter") and a cause may also be probabilistic. There is no halfway serious epistemology definition of causality that excludes both possibilities.

It makes testing of a hypothesis more difficult, but that is a different matter.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> There is no halfway serious epistemology definition of causality that excludes both possibilities.


Perhaps. But both ideas, especially the second one, contradict the natural sense, being counter-intuitive. Which was the source of so much talking. It is like: I went to shop because one dog was barking. Did I really? Of course I did: since the dog was barking, I absolutely needed to think about how it barked, and thus my thinking was deflected from reasons why I should not have gone to shop. But does that cause really tell something about my going to shop? Honestly, not, so the word "cause" sounds like too much of credit.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> Perhaps. But both ideas, especially the second one, contradict the natural sense, being counter-intuitive.


Yet both are commonplace in modern science. The last serious battle took place in the early days of quantum theory where the "hidden parameter theory" what the last defense line of a purely deterministic view on causality. In physics, this question touches the very core of our understanding of nature. In the "softer" sciences, this question is usually put aside and causal laws are usually expressed probabilistically, irrespective of whether it this is in the nature of these laws, i.e. they describe _propensities _which manifest themselves statistically, or whether the laws in truth deterministic but conditioned by unknown, pseudo-probabilistic unknown factors.


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## rur1920

Not sure what quantum mechanics have to do with our question (after all, neurons are rather big ;-) ). By the way, I don't see much conceptual difference between determinism of probability (probabilities are determined by physical law) and determinism of events ("real events" are determined by physical law). But this is a whole new song, and I don't know anything of the subject. As to the intuitive understanding of what is a cause, this understanding (and therefore the default use of the word "cause") is not even about laws of how things happen, it is about people: a cause is what describes an object well to a human. (What a cause directs is not so much the real objective things but instead the thinking of a human who makes decisions and elaborates behaviour concerning these things) And what describes an object well is what acts always in more or less the same fashion, unlike the loss of noun-verb agreement which may either leave or not leave a language pro-drop, and unlike the loss of case markers which may either leave (Bulgarian) or not leave (English) the free word order. Anyway, we seem to diverge too far from this poor thread, as it is becoming a "meta-discussion" (a discussion of a discussion). ;-)


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> Not sure what quantum mechanics have to do with our question..


Because that was the last event that triggered the last big discussion about causality in epistemology. The question is fairly settled now and I don't think any pre-scientific, "intuitive" concept of cause and effect is needed here.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> The question is fairly settled now and I don't think any pre-scientific, "intuitive" concept of cause and effect is needed here.


Well, I don't actually think that the concept of "cause" can meaningfully be scientific, or more exactly theoretic. Mathematics do well without any causes, so physics should. It is when we decide our approach to using those strict theories or to things in the nature (ice, weather, oceans, earthquakes…) the concept of cause becomes usable. The intuitive concept of cause is never outdated, as what we have to live with is intuition; outside intution, why at all bother with causes?


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> And what describes an object well is what acts always in more or less the same fashion, unlike the loss of noun-verb agreement which may either leave or not leave a language pro-drop, and unlike the loss of case markers which may either leave (Bulgarian) or not leave (English) the free word order.



A lack of correlation between these events has not been demonstrated in this thread, as far as I can tell: we haven't seen a clear example of the pro-drop feature persisting despite loss of subject-verb agreement (Russian past tense endings still agree in gender and number with their subject, subject pronouns are brought in when needed), or of word order remaining free despite the loss of case endings and subject-verb agreement (Bulgarian has distinct verb endings for all six persons).


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> A lack of correlation between these events has not been demonstrated in this thread, as far as I can tell: we haven't seen a clear example of the pro-drop feature persisting despite loss of subject-verb agreement


Sorry? What about those languages from Wikipedia? Well, I don't know of any loss in those languages (their history, as well as history of any other language, counts more than a few thousand years, though, so God knows what they had previously), but I personally do not see much difference between a loss and a lack from the beginning: both situations imply that users successfully communicate in their language, therefore such language has a right for existence. Whether there is a difference between a loss and an initial lack is, at least, a question that has no meaningful answer given what we know about how languages function and what we don't; and in any case, talking about intuitive causation when the actual mechanism is unknown always feels dangerous.


> […] or of word order remaining free despite the loss of case endings and subject-verb agreement (Bulgarian has distinct verb endings for all six persons).


I mentioned Classical Chinese; the notes from that text-book beg to be interpreted in the sense that that language had free (i.e. syntactically not strictly constrained) word order.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> … subject pronouns are brought in when needed …


That's exactly what I mean, if only you don't take "needed" to mean "pragmatically needed", because the cases in which subject pronouns are needed are not limited to those of necessary disambiguation. So, the answer to the question _when_ they are needed _does not_ depend on any formal grammatical features of words in the text, but on other things, which is the whole point. Russian uses subject pronouns a lot more often than, say, Italian, both in the present/future tenses and in the past tense; yet not in any regular fashion.


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## rur1920

Well, actually in Russian in many clauses lacking a subject pronoun the meaning can be understood with the following rule: the clause shares the subject pronoun with the subject pronoun of another clause in the same sentence, which is semantically "collinear" with this clause. That rule is why I felt necessary to talk about "local context" when discussing that quote from the interview: in a way, two separate sentences are like one sentence with two clauses. An example (Лев Толстой, «Крейцерова соната»): «Рядом со мной стоял еврей и тоже пил. Он разговорился, и я, чтобы только не оставаться одному в своем вагоне, пошел с ним в его грязный, накуренный и забрызганный шелухой от семечек вагон третьего класса. Там я сел с ним рядом, и он много что-то болтал и рассказывал анекдоты. Я слушал его, но не мог понимать того, что он говорит, потому что <no word> продолжал думать о своем.» I think you can easily know who continued to think about his own business, the Jew or the narrator. (Please tell me if you need a literal translation; I don't know how much Slovene helps with deciphering these sentences). (By the way, in general Tolstoi was not prone to omitting subject pronouns).


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## Gavril

rur1920 said:


> Sorry? What about those languages from  Wikipedia? Well, I don't know of any loss in those languages (their  history, as well as history of any other language, counts more than a  few thousand years, though, so God knows what they had previously), but I  personally do not see much difference between a loss and a lack from  the beginning:



The difference is that a loss is a process  (rather than a state), and therefore it is possible to look for causal  correlations between between the loss and the state that follows it.

By  contrast, in languages that do not have regular subject pronouns or verbal subject marking  (e.g. possibly Japanese), and whose earlier history we don't know, it is not clear what cause this state is the  effect of. Maybe, in these cases, there never was any  regular subject marking to lose, or maybe the loss was so slow and  gradual that it "escaped" the compensatory mechanisms that would have  followed from a more sudden loss.



> I mentioned Classical  Chinese; the notes from that text-book beg to be interpreted in the  sense that that language had free (i.e. syntactically not strictly  constrained) word order.



Aside from the point about lack vs. loss, it seems from that  description (in post #13) that Classical Chinese did have a standard  word order -- i.e. a pattern regular enough that alternative word orders could be  seen as exceptions to it. Also, inasmuch as Classical Chinese was  mainly a written register (disconnected from contemporary speech), the  pressure towards functionality would probably not have been as strong as  it would have been in the spoken language: i.e., people reading texts in Classical Chinese would have had more "patience" for deciphering unusual word orders than they would have had if they were trying to listen and understand someone speaking.


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## Gavril

> Я слушал его, но не мог понимать того, что он говорит, потому что <no word> продолжал думать о своем.



Based on Google's translation, I'd guess that the narrator is the missing subject. I notice that the other person's verb is in the present tense ("он говорит"), whereas all the other verbs in the sentence are past-tense; I'm not sure if this would be an important clue for fluent speakers.


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## rur1920

Gavril said:


> The difference is that a loss is a process  (rather than a state), and therefore it is possible to look for causal  correlations between between the loss and the state that follows it.


For correlations indeed, but how much causal, is a different, independent question.


> Aside from the point about lack vs. loss, it seems from that  description (in post #13) that Classical Chinese did have a standard  word order -- i.e. a pattern regular enough that alternative word orders could be  seen as exceptions to it.


Right, but for example in Russian the standard or at least neutral, i.e. generally least outstanding or drawing attention to itself, word order also exists, this is SVO. «Мама мыла раму». What I am talking about is syntactical indetermination: for defining the word order, considerations other than formal syntax are applied. In the absolute sense, word order is nowhere free, of course. At least, in English word orders like OSV are such a rarity that there would bo no point mentioning them in an introductory text-book.


> Also, inasmuch as Classical Chinese was  mainly a written register (disconnected from contemporary speech), the  pressure towards functionality would probably not have been as strong as  it would have been in the spoken language: i.e., people reading texts in Classical Chinese would have had more "patience" for deciphering unusual word orders than they would have had if they were trying to listen and understand someone speaking.


That is a double-edged sword and a double-ended stick. In spoken, in possession is less time, but more context. For example, in Bulgarian, as was already mentioned, word order is freer in spoken speech. Same in Russian.


Gavril said:


> Based on Google's translation, I'd guess that the narrator is the missing subject. I notice that the other person's verb is in the present tense ("он говорит"), whereas all the other verbs in the sentence are past-tense; I'm not sure if this would be an important clue for fluent speakers.


«Я не понял того, что он сказал, потому что думал о своём» works exactly the same, and this sentence alone is enough to understand who does what. Actually, it works somewhat against my pronounced position of formal freedom of using subject pronouns in Russian, because the logic of a "shared pronoun" seems to work in such cases independently from the rest of all speaking.


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## berndf

rur1920 said:


> Well, I don't actually think that the concept of "cause" can meaningfully be scientific, or more exactly theoretic. Mathematics do well without any causes, so physics should. It is when we decide our approach to using those strict theories or to things in the nature (ice, weather, oceans, earthquakes…) the concept of cause becomes usable. The intuitive concept of cause is never outdated, as what we have to live with is intuition; outside intution, why at all bother with causes?


Well, you said yourself, you don't much about such things. I am afraid we can't have an "Introduction to epistemology" class in this thread which would be needed to before one can answer this. The bottom line is that causality still is an important pillar of all sciences and, no, we can't ignore it, even if things are not as simple any more as they were in Newtonian mechanics.


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## rur1920

berndf said:


> I am afraid we can't have an "Introduction to epistemology" class in this thread which would be needed to before one can answer this.


I don't think this is necessary: building special philosophical theories around the notion of a cause, which our intuition (that, itself, _may_ be a subject of a theory) works with in a non-theoretical way, is the same as counting angels on the head of a needle. Whatever paradoxes there may be involving the notions of causality, they should only be reworked to drive these notions away from the text. If there is something that cannot be driven away from the text, then it is not connected with a cause in the intuitive understanding of the term that I was and am talking about, and therefore it has nothing to do with this thread.


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## rur1920

*First post.*
I think I need to explain with examples this riddle. In all phrases like "Summer in the Northern Hemisphere comes because there the surface of the planet receives more sunlight in this period", "The Northern Hemisphere receives more sunlight in summer because the axis of Earth's rotation around itself is oblique to the plane of Earth's rotation around the Sun", "I bought this bread because I like its taste", "Mary married him because he loved her", _because_ has roughly the same meaning that does not depend on and is in no way connected with any theoretical developments of physics. If physics have their own theoretic notions of causality, fine. but they have nothing to do with ordinary usage: it is quite evident that what we think of Mary is the same whether we are acquainted with anything of physics or not. Now, to think, ordinary usage is concerned, instead of achieving a theoretical knowledge of something, with decisions on how to direct one's thought when one wants to achieve a certain effect or to prevent it: the statement "there is thunder, because a lightning strikes" is in no way theoretic, yet it helps to know that if one wants to prevent a lightning strike, thinking of installing sound insulation is not a right way of thinking. For nature, it's all the same whether we install sound insulation or not, it only corresponds to its own theoretical (mathematical, as we can guess) form and does not care for causes we think of. So, berndf, I think you are mixing cutlets with milk. 


* Second post.*


Gavril said:


> Maybe, in these cases, there never was any  regular subject marking to lose, or maybe the loss was so slow and  gradual that it "escaped" the compensatory mechanisms that would have  followed from a more sudden loss.


There may be a difference between whether I want to express a grammatical meaning or I want to express a meaning that is not grammatical. For example, sometimes (seldom, when tired or something like that) I may fail to "turn on" inflection of Russian nouns, leaving them in the nominative case. I noticed that sometimes it happened in genitive constructions (in fact, possessive constructions; I do not remember the exact examples, but that does not matter). Of course, in spoken speech there is no problem to understand what is what (spoken speech seems to be fairly resistent to mistakes), but still, if such pattern continues, I may feel that something is lacking and feel the wish (which need not to be rational) to substitute. That wish could result in the wish to insert the preposition на, which returns comfort to my soul. So, we might have the following chain (for example)): «я те отдал книгу мамы» -> «я те отдал книга мама» -> «я те отдал книга на мама» («те» is indeed sometimes used in spoken speech, as the last stressed syllable in «тебе» is omitted). Such continuation of the chain feels as natural and really necessary to me. Now, must I conclude that languages should follow a general pattern of substituting the genitive case meaning with some similar grammatical meaning if the genitive case goes out of use? On the first thought, it might seem I must; but really, I must not.

The question is what exactly I want to express; and if I want to express what kind of book notion this notion is (it is my mother's), rather than to state which grammatical relationships this notion participates in, then lack of consistency in expressing the idea of of being related to or of possession does not hamper anything; for example, the Chinese omit 的 (very roughly, a marker of "genitive case") when a close relative is the possessor. Do I have to want to continue to express the grammatical idea? No, I do not; for example, Russian lost in its evolution a complicated system of past tenses with no adequate revenue, which Bulgarian did not. How these grammatical ideas, that are associated with the notion of a subject pronoun or of subject-object marking, are different from the grammatical idea of tense? In no way. In this example, different grammatical subjects (he and you) were used to express the same thing (one who sat in the wrong place) in almost the same statement; so, in this example the real-world subject was more important and ready to be expressed than the grammatical subject (statements should always look connected, right? so, indeed, for the mind of the old lady who said it the subject was still the same). That does not say anything about the entire language, but that shows that indeed the grammatical idea of a subject _may_ be of limited importance for a language user. So, what the users conserve and what they do not depends on their caprice rather than on statistics of pragmatic (rational) need for a certain construction or on velocity of the change. The real subject of study, if unreachable, might be the conditions in which such irrational caprices arise and exist. All in all, I think that the conclusion about what is a "cause" of the present state in English (reformulating, how should we direct our thought about people who spoke different historical versions of English, and how should we direct our thought about languages in general) depends on what is a default explanation for a given person, for lack of evidence.


* Third post.*
One last example. The famous phrase of Caesar, “Veni. Vedi. Vici”, is in Russian «Пришёл. Увидел. Победил». Indeed, the version with the subject pronouns would sound extremely weird, as if Caesar was starting a story three times yet all three times did not want to finish it.  There is no reason whatsoever why English could not have it as “Came. Saw. Conquered”, yet somehow it could not. A grammatical caprice? Yes, sir! The cause of the caprice, its reason? Unknown. Maybe if not for this species of caprices, some other features of English (popular phrasings, like “called home”, meanings of some words, etc) would also be different, all is interconnected. But, of course, its evolution happened the way it did.


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## francisgranada

rur1920 said:


> ... The famous phrase of Caesar, “Veni. Vedi. Vici”, is in Russian «Пришёл. Увидел. Победил» .


In my opinion it is not a mere "caprice" because we know the reason: the loss of verb "to be". See e.g. the Slovak "Prišiel som. Videl som. Zvíťazil som." In other words, in some cases in Russian it is still possible to use this structure without the subject pronoun, even if the lack of the verb "to be" makes this structure (partially) ambiguous.





> Indeed, the version with the subject pronouns would sound extremely weird, as if Caesar was starting a story three times yet all three times did not want to finish it.  ...


This is more or less true also in Slovak, Hungarian, Italian etc ... where the pers. pronoun is not obligatory. I.e. in this case the Russian _still _"_remembers_" the  difference between _пришёл _and _я пришёл_, as in general the pers. pronoun is not mandatory. (This is not the case of the English because of the different development/history of the conjugation).


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## rur1920

francisgranada said:


> In my opinion it is not a mere "caprice" because we know the reason: the loss of verb "to be". See e.g. the Slovak "Prišiel som. Videl som. Zvíťazil som." In other words, in some cases in Russian it is still possible to use this structure without the subject pronoun, even if the lack of the verb "to be" makes this structure (partially) ambiguous.


That the loss of this verb, which among other things played a role of the subject marker, did not lead to the feeling of obligatoriness of insertion of the personal pronouns (so that for example in this case the option of not inserting them, which is a potentiality in standard Russian, is implemented in actuality), that the presence of these pronouns (apparently, “still”; though I should note that the meaning I am going to refer to must be quite natural and therefore easy to adapt anew, because the choice between mentioning and not mentioning a word naturally gives a hint on whether that word is important to the speaker and also naturally depends, as a fact of life, on whether it happens to be represented in the mind of the speaker as important in some way) expresses a meaning of the kind of “initiation of a topic”, _is_ a result of caprice. A caprice is, perhaps, a wrong word, because the event that this caprice happened must have depended on established ways of thought among some speakers of early Russian (those whose approaches to speaking the language became accepted by the language); this “caprice” is still strictly conditioned, just not by the traits of the structure of the language. Maybe that is the formulation: the interesting subject is how people use words, not how words are organised in a language, because the first question and the second question are not fully connected, and the first question is the one that has consequences.


> I.e. in this case the Russian _still _"_remembers_" the  difference between _пришёл _and _я пришёл_, as in general the pers. pronoun is not mandatory.


I would like to note that this proverb is not conserved through frequent oral repetition among people and therefore  represents a general fact of the language rather than something special  and idiomatic. It does not “feel” as anything special either.


> (This is not the case of the English because of the different development/history of the conjugation).


  This is not. But this could well have: all was in humans' hands.


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