<html><head></head><body><div style="font-family: Verdana;font-size: 12.0px;"><div>Dear Ian,</div>
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<div>This is an interesting discussion, thank you. Concerning your inclusion of demonstratives, I would be careful. Only a subtype of demonstratives is akin to personal pronouns. But demonstratives, like interrogatives, can belong to many different word classes, including pronouns, but also numerals, adjectives, nouns, etc. They can be said to be some sort of "meta-word class" as Dixon put it. Depending on the language, the word class can be seen in how they inflect or in their distributional properties. Some may inflect like pronouns, but others like numerals and so on. If you include certain demonstratives, you might consider also including those interrogatives that behave like pronouns. There are also similar grammaticalization paths of the demonstratives and interrogatives relevant to the discussion. Apart from certain demonstratives being used for third person pronouns, which you mentioned, there is also a common development from selective interrogatives to pronominal interrogatives, such as Chinese nǎgè 'which-clf' > 'who' (in some dialects).</div>
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<div>Best,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Andi</div>
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<div style="margin: 0 0 10.0px 0;"><b>Gesendet:</b> Dienstag, 06. Juli 2021 um 11:03 Uhr<br/>
<b>Von:</b> "JOO, Ian [Student]" <ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk><br/>
<b>An:</b> "lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" <lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org>, "Martin Haspelmath" <martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de><br/>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] Definition of “personal pronoun"</div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Dear Martin,</span><br/>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">thank you for your definition.</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">But as for (b), Korean can express (i) with any noun:</span></div>
<blockquote style="border-left-color: rgb(26,188,156);margin: 5.0px;padding-left: 10.0px;border-left-width: thin;border-left-style: solid;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">(b) "Does mom/dad/brother/Ian(i) think that mom/dad/brother/Ian(i) has an answer?"</span></blockquote>
<div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">So that would classify any noun as a pronoun.</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">The difficulty of defining a personal pronoun seems to suggest that it’s not a good category to begin with. Perhaps “definite pronoun”, including “personal pronouns” and demonstratives, would be a clearer category? It would be typologically more meaningful since many languages don’t distinguish demonstratives from (3sg) personal pronouns. </span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">I’m trying to make cross-linguistic matrices of personal pronouns (see below), and for the moment I’m including demonstratives in the matrices.</span><br/>
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<img src="cid:E2530C591C8E49D9AB00BD45CD312A03" style="max-width: 100.0%;height: auto;"/></div>
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Regards,
<div>Ian</div>
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<div>On 6 Jul 2021, 4:49 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
<blockquote style="border-left-color: grey;border-left-width: thin;border-left-style: solid;margin: 5.0px 5.0px;padding-left: 10.0px;">Maybe the following will work:<br/>
<br/>
"A personal pronoun is a free form that (i) denotes a speech role (speaker/producer and/or hearer/comprehender) OR that is used as an anaphoric form AND (ii) that can be used in a complement clause coreferentially with a matrix clause argument."<br/>
<br/>
This is a disjunctive definition that brings together locuphoric forms ('I', 'we', 'you') and 3rd-person anaphoric (or "endophoric") forms, following the Western tradition (but not following any kind of compelling logic).<br/>
<br/>
It seems that personal pronouns need to be delimited from three types of somewhat doubtful forms:<br/>
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– person indexes (I do not include bound forms under "personal pronoun" here, following my 2013 paper on person indexes: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://zenodo.org/record/1294059" target="_blank">https://zenodo.org/record/1294059</a>)<br/>
– demonstratives<br/>
– titles like "Your Majesty"<br/>
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I think that if a language has a form like "that-one" or "your-majesty" that can be used coreferentially in a complement clause, one will regard it as a personal pronoun:<br/>
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(a) "My sister(i) thinks that that-one(i) has an answer."<br/>
(b) "Does your-majesty(i) think that your-majesty(i) has an answer?"<br/>
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In German, the polite second-person pronoun "Sie" (which has Third-Person syntax) can be used in (b), but the demonstrative "die" can hardly be used in (a), so it would not count as a personal pronoun (yet). However, in Hindi-Urdu and Mongolian, as mentioned by Ian, the demonstrative can be used in this way (I think), so it would count as a personal pronoun.<br/>
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I don't think we need the general notion of "person" to define "personal pronoun". Wikipedia's current definition is therefore quite confusing (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun</a>).<br/>
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Thanks for this interesting challenge, Ian! It seems to me that quite a few of our traditional terms CAN be defined, but their definitions are not obvious at all (and the textbooks don't usually give the definitions).<br/>
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Best,<br/>
Martin<br/>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 06.07.21 um 06:53 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:</div>
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<div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Dear typologists,</span><br/>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">I’m having a hard time trying to find a definition of a “personal pronoun”.</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">One definition is that a personal pronoun refers to a literal person, a human being. But then again, non-human pronouns like English </span><em style="font-family: Times New Roman;">it</em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> are also frequently included as a personal pronoun.</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Another definition seems to be that “personal” refers to a grammatical person and not a literal person. Thus, </span><em style="font-family: Times New Roman;">it</em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> refers to the (non-human) 3rd person, therefore it is a personal pronoun.</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">But then again, demonstratives, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns also refer to the 3rd person. (This </span><em style="font-family: Times New Roman;">is</em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> a book, who </span><em style="font-family: Times New Roman;">is </em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">that man, anything </span><em style="font-family: Times New Roman;">is </em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">possible) Then are they also personal pronouns?</span><br/>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">What’s the clearest definition of a personal pronoun, if any?</span></div>
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>From Hong Kong,
<div>Ian</div>
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