Re Personal pronouns

[ECOLING at aol.com]

In the discussion between Larry Trask and Pat Ryan,
each of them has a partly valid perspective.

Pat points out that "Personal Pronouns" may properly
include "possessives" or "possessive pronouns".
Trask objects that "possessives" are not pronouns,
as proven by distributional criteria.

The gap in Trask's logic is the assumption that
the definition of "personal pronoun"
must depend essentially and exclusively on a distributional meaning,
and cannot have another legitimate basis.

In fact, "personal pronoun" was defined by use long before
Trask or any of the rest of us were born, and does
indeed have "a" (not "the") legitimate use emphasizing more the
semantic content and less the distributional occurrence /
part-of-speech characteristics of use.

It is not a valid counterargument
to say that "possessive pronouns" must be "pronouns" in every respect.
That depends on the assumption that the composite is transparent,
and would lead to the conclusion that "White House" must be a white
house, even if it were another color, patently an error of reasoning.
Rather, "possessive" may already signal a member of the class
of determiners, or whatever one considers "possessive pronouns"
to be closest to, distributionally.

So there is no absolute right or wrong in these discussions,
there are legitimate arguments for each point of view.

Which means it is NOT legitimate to say the other point
of view is simply wrong (however that may be phrased).

Sincerely,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics