I thought I read somewhere that there is/are language(s) in the world that has/have no subject (doer) acting on an object. For instance, instead of “I am walking”, the language structure would say “There is walking.” The language would apparently be reporting the observation of actions and things, but omit reference to a person or cause of the action.
What do you know about this,
Gee that would make life a whole lot easier for a kid. “Who took the cookies?”
“There is taking of cookies, Mom.”
I don’t know the exact answer to your question, but I could see it being possible. There are several languages that don’t have a verb that explicitly translates to “to have” in English (Russian and Hungarian, for example.) So the construction in those languages for a sentence like “I have an apple” is “By/At me there is an apple” or “There is my apple.” “There is” in the sense of existence, not location.
[nitpick]
There’s no object in your example sentence.
[/nitpick]
I find this hard to believe. A big chunk of the point of communicating is to explain who did what and to whom.
Given that Patrick’s example sentence used no direct object (i.e. an intransitive verb), I am wondering if he is referencing the use of the ergative case in some languages:
There are ergative languages, in which the agent of an intransitive verb, which in English is treated the same as the subject of a transitive verb, is instead treated like the object. To illustrate, it would be a bit like if we said in English
I cooked dinner (transitive)
but
Cooked me (rather than “I cooked”) (intransitive)
But the “me” in that second sentence is still the subject.
[ETA] whoops, too slow
I am not a linguist, but in certain other languages there are situations where we would describe an action without having an acting agent agent, whereas in English we would. For example, if I were to drop my favorite coffee mug, and the end result was that it broke, I would say in English “I broke the glass.” You would say “She broke the glass.” In certain other languages, like Spanish for example, we would say “The glass broke itself.”
One of the working assumptions in linguistics is that any human language is equally capable of expressing any idea, and so it would be quite remarkable if there were a language where agency is not expressed. To my knowledge no such language exists. It would also be quite remarkable if there were a language that merely tended to leave agency unexpressed, since as has already been pointed out, one of the important communicative functions of language is to describe “who did what to whom”.
However, there are a variety of phenomena that may be seen as vaguely similar to what you’re asking about:
-In some languages, the subject can be omitted if it is recoverable from context. These are known as “pro-drop” languages, which include for example Spanish and Chinese. However, this is not the same as suppression of agency since the referent of the missing subject is recoverable from context, similar to the way pronouns require antecedents.
-All languages have means of suppressing agency, for example via the passive construction in English and many other languages. But as far as I know this is always the ‘marked’ (less frequent, requiring extra grammatical machinery) option.
-In so-called ‘ergative’ languages, subjects of intransitive verbs pattern grammatically with objects of transitive verbs (e.g., in terms of what case they receive). But the subject is still expressed in such languages.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that subjects do not always denote agents/doers, although they tend to. This is important because it affects how you would even test the claim. “Language X does not have subjects” is a syntactic claim; “Language X does not express agency” is a semantic one.
Probably less extreme than the other examples, but in Latin, you can omit a pronoun that’s the subject of a sentence. So, for instance, the sentence “I am” could be translated as “Ego sum”, where “Ego” means “I” and “sum” means “am”, but you could also translate it as just “sum”. If the “ego” is included, it’s just for emphasis.
The same is true for Spanish.
Yo voy and Voy both mean I go. Tu vienes and Vienes both mean You come. The first is simply more emphatic. I think this is similar to, if not exactly what sundog was talking about with pro-drop languages, if I am correct in assuming that pro-drop is short for pronoun dropping.
The same is true among a lot of languages. Off the top of my head, all the Slavic languages allow this, the Finno-Ugric languages do, all the Romance languages except French, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, etc. In some of these the subject information can be inferred from the conjugation of the verb. In others, it’s inferred from the context.
Now that I think about it, I’m wondering if perhaps the OP is thinking of Japanese. I don’t speak it myself, but it is my understanding that subjects and objects of sentences are often dropped if the context of the conversation makes it clear who is doing what to whom.
Here are two “I broke…” examples:
[ul]
[li]http://www.ciao.es/Cafeteras_de_goteo_273427_3-de_10_a_12_tazas in “¡¡¡ UNA BUENA CAFETERA !!!” (a good coffee pot) has “rompí su jarrita”, or “I broke its little mug”.[/li][li]http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/08/05/espana/1186327547.html has, “Uno de los viajeros: ‘Rompí el cristal a golpes y por ahí salimos todos’”, or “One of the travelers: I broke the glass with blows and we all left through there”.[/li][/ul]
English. As in “It’s raining,” which reports a condition but does not identify any agent.
I have a dim (20+ year old) memory of reading Benjamin Lee Whorf make this assertion about… Hopi?
Shaka, when the walls fell.
I think my memory might not be too far off. Here is an extract from a book called Native Peoples of the Southwest:
Korean and Japanese both allow the subject to be dropped in a known reference (in English, a referent or pronoun would still be required.
Example:
English: My friend came. He ate.
Japanese/Korean: My friend came. Ate.
“My friend came. Ate” doesn’t sound too far from informal English like “I went shopping. Saw some really cool shoes. Didn’t have any money though.”
Maybe your example is correct even in formal Japanese/Korean, though?