<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="font-size: 20px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;">Dear typologists,</span></font></div><div style="font-size: 20px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="5" style="font-size: 28px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; ">The relevant question has been discussed in the boader context of a person, whether unknown, unrecognized or unseen, who needs to identify him/herself. Situations may differ. Consider, e.g., (a) a person knocking the door and asked "Who is it?" or "Who are you?"; (b) a person sitting in your company, whom you have not seen for a long time and you cannot recognize and you ask about, who wishes to tell that it is she; (c) Joseph presenting himself to his brothers; (d) a person calling you on the telephone and has the (not uncommon) habit of opening by self identification; (e) a radio station opening by announcing which it is, like “it is London calling”, “говорит Москва”, or just the name; (f) people presenting themselves to foreigners, etc. etc. Some pertinent comments will be found in descriptions of German concerning </span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>Ích bin es</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; "> (</span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>ích</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; "> as “emphatic predicate”) / </span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>Ich bín es</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; "> (</span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>ich</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; "> subject), in comments about the difference in French between </span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>je le suis</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; "> and </span><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;"><i>c’est moi</i></span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; ">, and elsewhere. Usage also differs according to the degree of expectation of the person that he should have been recognized. For special syntactic structures cf. among others Elfriede Adelberg, <i>Die Sätze des Typus “Ih bin ez Ioseph” im Mittelhochdeutchen</i>, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960. </span></font></div><div style="font-size: 20px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;">Generally speaking, one might recommend recording diligently actual usage rather than relying on intuitive offhand responses. In my native Hebrew I am not sure I can answer the question; it depends.</span></font></div><div style="font-size: 20px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="5" style="font-size: 28px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; ">Yours,</span></font></div><div style="font-size: 20px; "><font class="Apple-style-span" face="'Times New Roman'" size="6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px;">Gideon.</span></font></div><br style="font-size: 20px; "><div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">On 7 Aug 2009, at 5:9, David Gil wrote:</span></font></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div>Dear all,<br><br>Consider the following very similar contexts;<br><br>Context A:<br>John and Bill are friends. John calls Bill on a landphone; it's a bad line, Bill doesn't know who is speaking; John tries to identify himself (using a predicate nominal construction)...<br><br>Context B:<br>John and Bill are friends. John sends Bill a text message from a new number that Bill is unfamiliar with; John identifies himself (using a predicate nominal construction)...<br><br>My question:<br><br>In languages that you are familiar with, in the above contexts, is the subject of the predicate nominal construction a demonstrative or a 1st pronoun pronoun?<br><br>In English, the subject is a demonstrative; the pronoun is infelicitous in the given context:<br><br>This is John<br>#I am John<br><br>But in Indonesian, the subject is most commonly a pronoun, though a demonstrative is also possible:<br><br>Ini John [less common]<br>Aku John<br><br>I am curious to know what happens in other languages. (I have a hunch that the availability of the "pronominal subject" option in Indonesian is correlated with the questionable status of pronouns as a discrete grammatical category in Indonesian, but this hunch is easily testable with a bit of cross-linguistic data.)<br><br>Note: I don't expect to find differences between the two contexts; I provided both just in order to make the situation more natural to as many respondents as possible.<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>David<br><br>-- <br>David Gil<br><br>Department of Linguistics<br>Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology<br>Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany<br><br>Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119<br>Email: <a href="mailto:gil@eva.mpg.de">gil@eva.mpg.de</a><br>Webpage: <a href="http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/">http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/</a><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>