A pro-sentence is a sentence where the subject pronoun has been dropped and therefore the sentence has a null subject.
Overview
Languages differ within this parameter, some languages such as
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance languag ...
and
Spanish have constant
pro-drop
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language in which certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite ...
,
Finnish and
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
for example are partial pro-drop languages and
Japanese and
Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
People, culture and language
* Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia
**Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka
** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...
fall into the category of discourse or radical pro-drop languages. There are also languages such as English, German and Swedish that only allow pro-drop within very strict stylistic conditions. A pro-sentence is a kind of
pro-form
In linguistics, a pro-form is a type of function word or expression (linguistics) that stands in for (expresses the same content as) another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context. They are used eithe ...
and is therefore
anaphoric.
In
English,
''yes'', ''no'' and ''
okay
''OK'' (), with spelling variations including ''okay'', ''okeh'', ''O.K.'' and many others, is an English word (originating in American English) denoting approval, acceptance, agreement, assent, acknowledgment, or a sign of indifference. ''O ...
'' are common pro-sentences. In response to the question "Does Mars have two moons?", the sentence "Yes" can be understood to abbreviate "Mars does have two moons."
Pro-sentences are sometimes seen as grammatical
interjection
An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
s, since they are capable of very limited
syntactical relations. But they can also be classified as a distinct
part of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ...
, given that (other) interjections have
meanings of their own and are often described as expressions of
feeling
According to the '' APA Dictionary of Psychology'', a feeling is "a self-contained phenomenal experience"; feelings are "subjective, evaluative, and independent of the sensations, thoughts, or images evoking them". The term ''feeling'' is closel ...
s or
emotion
Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavior, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is ...
s.
Yes and no
In some languages, the equivalents to ''yes'' and ''no'' may substitute not only a whole sentence, but also a part of it, either the
subject and the
verb
A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual description of English, the basic f ...
, or the verb and a
complement, and can also constitute a subordinate
clause
In language, a clause is a Constituent (linguistics), constituent or Phrase (grammar), phrase that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic Predicate (grammar), predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject (grammar), ...
.
The
Portuguese word ''
sim'' (''yes'') gives a good example:
:Q:
:A: (literally, that yes)
:
: (literally, John yes).
In some languages, such as English, ''yes'' rebuts a negative question, whereas ''no'' affirms it. However, in
Japanese, the equivalents of ''no'' () rebut a negative question, whereas the equivalents of ''yes'' () affirm it.
:Q:
:A: , literally
Some languages have a specific word that rebuts a negative question.
German has ,
French has ,
Norwegian has ,
Danish has ,
Swedish has , and
Hungarian has . The English words "yes" and "no" were originally only used to respond to negative questions, while "yea" and "nay" were the proper responses to affirmative questions; this distinction was lost at some time in Early Modern English.
:Q:
:A:
In philosophy
The prosentential
theory of truth
Truth or verity is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth, 2005 In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as ...
developed by
Dorothy Grover,
Nuel Belnap
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. (; May 1, 1930 – June 12, 2024) was an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh ...
, and
Joseph Camp, and defended more recently by
Robert Brandom, holds that sentences like ''"p" is true'' and ''It is true that p'' should not be understood as ascribing properties to the sentence "p", but as a pro-sentence whose content is the same as that of "p." Brandom calls " . . .is true" a pro-sentence-forming operator.
[Brandom, ''Making it Explicit'', 1994.]
See also
*
*
References
* Holmberg, A. 2001. 'The syntax of yes and no in Finnish.' ''Studia Linguistica'' 55: 141- 174.
{{Lexical categories, state=collapsed
Parts of speech