WHY IS THE TERM “PRO-DROP” SO POPULAR?

The paper examines the causes of the striking popularity of the term ‘pro-drop' among linguists of today. ‘Pro-drop' refers to languages where pronominal subject is usually zero if unmarked: Ø_pro parlo italiano ‘I speak Italian' (it.) Being of generative origin, ‘pro-drop' quickly gained popularity among linguists of various theoretical approaches and eventually replaced other alternatives (“referential agreement”, “bound pronoun”, etc.). Nevertheless, the application of the term ‘pro-drop' is often criticized by typologists who blame it for an English bias and for the assumption of an overt pronoun that used to exist but somehow was dropped, which is senseless for languages like Chinese and Japanese. Albeit true, ‘pro-drop' as a term dominates in literature on the subject. The search for the causes of that phenomenon and syntactic - semantic analysis reveal three main factors contributing to ‘pro-drop' popularity. First, alternative terms describing pronominal subject expression are of two and more words, thus less preferable in comparison with one-word concepts from the language principle of economy and least effort (Zipf, 1949; Piantadosi, et al., 2011). Second, according to the Principle of Compositionality (the meaning of a complex language unit is a function of the meanings of the parts and of the way they are syntactically combined), the closer the lexeme “language” and the semantically related referential term stand to each other, the more heuristics the addressee will have for correct and quick interpretation. Due to their compound character, terminological units like “strict agreement” or “bound forms” allow much lesser number of contexts for use. Their adjectival use (^? “bound forms language” ) is very restricted, whereas a single short 'pro-drop' cluster is commonly used in this kind of contexts (^ok “pro-drop language” ). In addition, sometimes obvious semantics of typological terms also narrows down the number of possible contexts for their use in discourse (* The Italian language is referential agreement ), while the “pro-drop / non-pro-drop” clusters, due to their artificial nature and lack of well-established linguistic connotations, are licensed in a larger number of contexts (^ok The Italian language is pro-drop ). The latter apparently gives more opportunities for the speaker to express the idea.