This paper redefines the use of subject pronouns in a specific pro-drop language, i.e. (spoken Madrid) Spanish. It is argued that they are not merely emphatic or contrastive subjects, but related in their functional usage to utterance-initial noun particles, whilst their appearance is determined by their conversational function as discourse topics. Moreover they add 'pragmatic weight' to a speaker's utterance, as they are used to signal utterances as 'more personally relevant' or 'less abstract'.