Subject ellipsis in Russian and Polish

Abstract

Polish and Russian are partial pro-drop languages with different patterns of subject realization: whereas pronominal subjects are more commonly elided in Polish, they are more commonly overt in Russian. This suggests an approach to modeling ellipsis that begins with the parameter baseline subject realization with the values overt and elided. Once a language has been thus parameterized (overt for Russian, elided for Polish), the rules for determining when to override that baseline decision must be formulated. At least four types of factors influence the realization decision for subjects in Russian and Polish: syntactic constraints; the semantic and stylistic nuances of the utterance; and two pragmatic constraints - the necessity of avoiding ambiguity and the preference for avoiding redundancy. While many theoretical approaches would stop at the point of making such generalizations, the approach taken here, which follows the theory of Ontological Semantics, necessitates that all of the proposed constraints be associated with heuristics sufficient to provide a non-native speaker or intelligent agent with a robust, practical knowledge of ellipsis usage. © 2009 The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica.