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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 138–158

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Chapter 8
Styling the characters, setting the scene

Subject omission in Agatha Christie

 | Ghent University, DiaLing
 | CNRS/University of Lille, UMR 8163 STL
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.08hae
Abstract
While not a pro drop language, English allows subject drop in specific registers such as abbreviated writing and colloquial speech. This paper studies subject drop in the representation of speech in British crime fiction. The core material consists of three stories by Agatha Christie, who uses subject drop to style characters and to create the conversational scene. Quantitative corpus data show that subject drop is a function of at least the following factors: education/social class, gender, familiarity, and (in)formality of speech setting. Nevertheless, due to the relatively small size of the samples we have studied, it is difficult to pin down the exact interactions between these four variables.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register-specific subject omission in English
    • 2.1Speech and writing
    • 2.2Crime fiction
  • 3.A gender bias?
    • 3.1Ratio overt/non overt subjects
    • 3.2Distribution
  • 4.Variation across individuals in 4:50 from Paddington
    • 4.1Social class
      • 4.1.1The Crackenthorpe family and household
      • 4.1.2Non-standard features of speech
    • 4.2Formality/style
  • 5.Conclusion and issues for future work
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (30)
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