Pidgin and creole languages LOVE “Ø” Object pronouns!
I’ll keep this as minimal as I can, in the spirit of the topic of “silent pronouns”.
Image credit: Youtube
I’ve noticed it’s pretty frequent for a contact language, be it a pidgin or a creole, to make a distinction between:
- animate/specific 3rd-person direct-Object pronouns being expressed by a word (and expressing ‘she’, ‘him’, etc.)…
- …inanimate/nonspecific 3rd-person direct Objects (‘it’, ‘some’, etc.) being expressed by silence, that is, by a “null” pronoun Ø.
I’ve noticed this in at least these languages that I’ve paid significant attention to:
- Juba Arabic (South Sudan in East Africa)
- Cameroonian Pidgin [Creole] English (Cameroon in West Africa)
- The Lingua Franca (in the Mediterranean)
- Chinook Jargon (in northwestern North America)
- West Coast Chinese Pidgin English (of North America)
- Also, a quasi-creole language such as Brazilian Portuguese (South America) has a very similar pattern of tending to use a Ø for non-human, non-animate, non-specific direct Objects. (It even has a nice wrinkle where you can see greater likelihood of using Ø for wild animals than for domesticated one!)
I seem not to find the presence of this feature indexed in the respected cross-linguistic survey, the World Atlas of Language Structures.
Nor do I find much in a literature search using Google Scholar.
Now — linguists have published countless papers on null Subjects, a term that they seem to give quite a different meaning to than what I’m talking about.
It’s bizarre, I dare say, to find such blinkered disregard for what we in linguistics call the Animacy Hierarchy. (We call it other stuff too.)
The Animacy Hierarchy is a well-known & fundamental observation that — in one way of putting it — a highly animate & specific referent such as “David” (an adult male human, yes, human languages are sexist!) is more likely to be a Subject, and less likely to be an Object, than say an inanimate & nonspecific referent such as “a book”.
A corollary of this is that (animate) Subjects are more likely to be expressed as words said out loud, and perhaps of relatively greater length and/or prosodic heaviness, than (inanimate) Objects —
— the latter then ideally having minimal length, to the extent of being represented by silence. (And even more to the point, taking up no utterance time at all, having zero duration.)
I feel it’s extremely likely that it’s not just contact languages that value Ø for inanimate and nonspecific direct objects. For instance, Sumerian, the earliest documented language (about 4,500 years ago, versus Chinook Jargon’s 200), had a Ø for just this function, in at least some of its verb paradigms.
I’d appreciate it if my readers want to point out other languages, and linguistic literature, that are relevant to this point.
Bonus fact:
Above, I profess shock about linguists not paying attention to Ø Objects.
But I’m not shocked at all.
We linguists need to develop an awareness of human cognition, don’t we?
Well now, humans are more attentive to what they can see (and hear) than to what they can’t see (or hear).
Ø is an absence of anything audible.
And the basic classes in linguistics that we all take rarely discuss nulls, and rarely teach you that there’s a way to visually notate them, as Ø.
This article immediately made me think of something that I read (and heard) some 30 years ago. In the first audiovisual “teach-yourself” type course that I took for Japanese, I recall that in the very first chapter of that course book, where a character is asking the question “Do you eat bread?,” the response to that question in Japanese is strictly just the “eat” verb form, not a full sentence or longer phrase that means, word for word, “Yes, I do,” “Yes, I eat it,” or “Yes, I eat bread / that,” and so on. The answer is actually a single word (tabemasu) that means “eating” or “eat” and is also not assisted by a pronoun. Indeed, it could be right for any person or number, and it is only understood from context that it’s being used for “I’m eating…” or “I eat…” and there is a null where we probably would expect the word for “bread / it / that.” Maybe this is related to your observation because a dish or a food item is clearly not animate and wouldn’t be expected to have agency.
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