possessive [form of a] pronoun

ECOLING at aol.com ECOLING at aol.com
Fri Mar 3 04:20:01 UTC 2000


Bob Whiting has widened our set of examples.
He thereby brought up yet another wholly new line of argument,
which was not covered by preceding messages.

I still refer back to the message "possessive [form of a] pronoun"
for the parallelism which it *did* contain,
and which is strongly supported by more detailed considerations,
as shown below.

First, I am not knowingly trying to mislead anyone,
despite Bob Whiting's claim:

>You have simply tried to slide one past us by using a form where the
>determiner 'his' and the possessive pronoun 'his' are isomorphic.

Not so, though I should not have to defend myself against
such a groundless ad-hominem assertion.
(The Postscript notes that I normally do just the reverse of that!)

I *did* choose the word "his" deliberately because unlike
some of the other genitive forms ("determiners", as many call them),
it does look more like an apostrophe-s form.

But I did not choose it because of homonymy between
determiner (my) and pronominal (mine) forms: (his, his).
I was not at all concerned with the pronominal forms
(his, hers, mine, yours, ours, theirs).
Bob Whiting's examples involve such pronominal forms,
but my examples did not involve them.
So there was nothing to "slide past" anyone.

If you add to the following examples I used the specification
that *we are talking about the determiner use of "his, my, etc"*,
which was certainly the context in which I was writing
(and please note that Larry Trask had also not been discussing
"mine" etc., and said so in response to Pat Ryan)...

Then there is no way of adding Bob Whiting's examples,
because they do not fit that context.  Here were my examples,
now extended only by adding a first-person example as well.

> The relation:
> he :: his
[> or
> I :: my   ]

> is from syntactic and semantic points of view
> essentially the same as the relation

> the man we met yesterday :: the man we met yesterday's.

This statement remains valid, as I think all linguists know.
A "syntactic and semantic" "relation" is not the same as a slot-filler
word class.
In the cases of "he", "I", and "the man we met yesterday",
dominant uses, and the use I exemplified,
are as full noun phrases.
In the cases of "his", "my", and "the man we met yesterday's ",
dominant uses, and the use I exemplified,
are as determiners of full noun phrases
(referring by "determiner" here to function and positions
of some occurrences, not to slot-filler word class).

The latter are not full noun phrases in most usages, as we all agree

(though the third of these can be used also as a full noun phrase,
in the more complex structures discussed below).

End of main line of argument (again, and just as previously stated).

***

Now as to the tangent, elaboration, or extension of range
of the discussion to pronominal forms like "mine, yours, ...":

Bob Whiting alleges that the lack of a complete parallel between forms
shows that an equivalence of syntactic and semantic relations does not exist.

This is not the case, as when we talk about word classes,
determined by slot-filler criteria, we often find only partial equivalences.
We even find that the surface form "this"
can function both as a determiner and as a pronoun (as I think the
participants in these discussions wish to call them).  So a relation
"this :: this" functions syntactically and semantically equivalently to
"my :: mine".  Merely one such asymmetry.

***

Whiting's parallels were these:

>This is the man we met yesterday's book.
>This is the book of the man we met yesterday.
>
>This is his book.
>This is the book of he.*

I find the fourth of these ungrammatical, of course.
I also find the second one odd, *either* in possessive sense
*or* in another sense which it might conceivably express,
a book about the man we met yesterday.
For the possessive sense, the sense in the examples I had given,
(note again that I had *not* given examples with pronominal usages),
I believe such a usage more normally occurs with a relative clause
following, than in the simple form given by Whiting:

This is the book of his   which we were talking about.
This is the book of mine   which we were talking about.
This is the book of John's   which we were talking about.
This is the book of the man we met yesterday's   which we were talking about.
     [as opposed to the books belonging to the man we met yesterday
     which we were not talking about]

The "of..." phrase in each case has at least sometimes been treated
as a transformation of something with a bit more concrete content:

This is the book from among mine which we were talking about.
This is the book from among John's which we were talking about.

or even
This is the book [which is mine] which we were talking about.
This is the book [which is John's] which we were talking about.

We also have the following form, which to me is more colloquially normal
with the apostrophe-s.  I believe it shows that, like "his",
the form "the man we met yesterday's" *can* function
either as modifier (parallel to "my")
or *sometimes* as a full noun phrase (parallel to "mine").

We then have a three-way relation,
and although some may not prefer the terminology which immediately
follows, I trust with the examples they will know what I am referring to:

The triple relations:

(nominative pronoun; determiner genitive pronoun; possessive pronoun NP)

he :: his :: his
I :: my :: mine

are equivalent to the triple relation:

the man we met yesterday ::
:: the man we met yesterday's :: the man we met yesterday's

with some slippage that in certain contexts and styles,
in the last triple relation,
the first form may sometimes be used for the third form
(but with stylistic marking and awkwardness of different forms
for different speakers depending on additional details of the contexts...).
The third of the forms in each of the relations above was *not*
previously prominent in these discussions (except very briefly).

I still plead to our list:
Can we now stop trying to prove people are wrong in using
traditional terminology?  It meant what it in fact referred to,
and we all knew what it was intended by the author to refer to.
Still does refer to just what it did before,
not only for those who themselves use terms that way,
but *also* for those who understand the terms that way
while preferring themselves to use different terms!
(And just as Larry Trask has pointed out that "pronoun" is an
illogical term, because it refers to what are really "proNP"s,
yet that we still use it successfully, so it can be the case for
other traditional terminology.)

Can we please rule out of order on this list any messages which
go off into meta-analysis to prove someone wrong because
of the terms they used,
instead of dealing with the content of what we perfectly well
know they were saying?
I thought that was the policy which our moderator declared
sometime back?

Sincerely yours,
Lloyd Anderson
Ecological Linguistics

***

In response to Bob Whiting's ad-hominem, an incorrect one:
>You have simply tried to slide one past us by using a form where the
>determiner 'his' and the possessive pronoun 'his' are isomorphic.

I may be *wrong* in some analysis I propose,
but I don't try to "slide" things "past" anyone.
Just the contrary, I tend to bring up counter-examples
even to my own beliefs!
People sometimes try to get me to shut up when we are on the same
team, precisely because I do that, because they don't want me to
present a more nuanced or balanced case.
I always try to see all sides and especially do not want to overstate
and have to retract something later!



More information about the Indo-european mailing list