Timeline for Leaving out pronouns in informal conversation
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 13, 2019 at 3:53 | comment | added | Jan | feiern is just one example verb (note how you’re constructing context to make a subject turn up). I may need to use a better standard example; how about ‘Hier wird geredet’? | |
| Sep 12, 2019 at 17:41 | history | edited | vectory | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 24 characters in body
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| Sep 12, 2019 at 17:31 | comment | added | vectory | I mean, the indefinite pronoun has to come from regular usage, ultimately. | |
| Sep 12, 2019 at 17:29 | comment | added | vectory | @Jan there are different opinions about how to describe such usages of it, see impersonal verbs which is not all the same thing but does mention the issue. Needles to say I do not subscribe to the idea of a dummy pronoun which strikes me as a dumbed down description for elementary scools. Ironically "regnen" is described as an impersonal verb anyhow but not without difficulty. Naively I'd say Hier wird es [das Fest] gefeiert, es [Sylvester] wird gefeiert does make sense (especially in your Rheinische Mundart), but not in other cases. | |
| Sep 11, 2019 at 15:28 | comment | added | Jan | It is only a pronoun when it replaces a noun. German knows two different types of expletive es: compare Es wird gefeiert and Es regnet. The difference is obvious when you add a locator: Hier wird gefeiert versus hier regnet es. In the first case, es cannot be a pronoun because it is absolutely impossible for it to replace anything; it is simply there to fill a syntactic void. In the second case, you can argue for it to be pronoun-like because it is actually the sentence subject but it really just is filling a grammatical void there too. | |
| Sep 11, 2019 at 14:58 | comment | added | vectory | @Jan it is not a pronoun? | |
| Sep 11, 2019 at 14:48 | comment | added | Jan | Not sure whether the expletive (Es ist mir klar) can be considered an unnecessary pronoun. It’s grammatically necessary and it is not a pronoun. | |
| Sep 11, 2019 at 14:39 | history | answered | vectory | CC BY-SA 4.0 |