Pro-sentence

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 and Spanish have constant pro-drop, Finnish and Hebrew for example are partial pro-drop languages and Japanese and Tamil 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 and is therefore anaphoric. In English, yes, no and okay 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 interjections, since they are capable of very limited syntactical relations. But they can also...