Levike wrote:Why does Russian use its pronouns despite having a conjugation system?
linguoboy wrote:Personal endings are found only in certain tense/mood combinations. They are notably absent in the past tense and in all forms of the copula. So I would conjecture that use of subject pronouns was generalised from instances without personal endings to all instances.
I understand why you would ask this question/conjecture that generalisation, but if you think about it the cross-linguistic picture is not as simple as "if there are person and number endings on the verb, then pronouns can be dropped". Even regarding Russian, there are after all some situations in which the pronoun can be dropped even when using the past tense forms (that only have number agreement) because it can be inferred from contextual information):
"Домашнее задание сделал?" "Did [you] finish your homework?"
"Cделал." "[I] finished [it]."
Not only that, but the cross-linguistic evidence is actually quite interesting (and complex). Both Chinese and Japanese allow subject and object drop, though they have no person or number agreement on their verbs. Or there are some languages in which not all pronouns can be dropped (Finnish can drop first and second person, but not third person pronouns).
Essentially, there is a theory regarding the behaviour of pronouns across languages, and it involves a series of yes/no parameters that would manage to classify all the quirky pronoun behaviour that is attested in natural languages, but the very first parameter is basically "Can you drop pronouns?" (and keeps detailing with "Is this restricted to syntactic subjects?", etc. but the starting point is still that) sooooo it's not exactly super informative. The answer to your question about why Russian does that, essentialy, as far as theories go at the moment, is exactly:
vijayjohn wrote:Because it just does?
Italian (native); English (C2); Dutch (B1-B2); French (B1-B2); Russian (B1); Danish (B1); German (A2-B1)
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