Complexity and pronoun drop in contact varieties of English

Abstract

The present paper argues that speakers of high-contact varieties of English drop pronouns more frequently than those of low-contact ones. This can be explained by the fact that high-contact varieties are or were used mainly as second languages by many members of their speech communities. Pronoun drop is a grammatical feature that produces simpler structures, and second language users prefer simpler structures. Using data extracted from the Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English and the International Corpus of English, the results of the study suggest that high-contact varieties of English favour pronoun omission.