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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear Martin,</span><br>
<br>
<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: 5px; padding-left: 10px; 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 dir="auto"><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>
<br>
<img style="max-width:100%;height:auto" src="cid:E2530C591C8E49D9AB00BD45CD312A03"></div>
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Regards,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
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<div name="messageReplySection">On 6 Jul 2021, 4:49 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de>, wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color: grey; border-left-width: thin; border-left-style: solid; margin: 5px 5px;padding-left: 10px;">
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>
<br>
– 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">https://zenodo.org/record/1294059</a>)<br>
– demonstratives<br>
– titles like "Your Majesty"<br>
<br>
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>
<br>
(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>
<br>
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>
<br>
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">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun</a>).<br>
<br>
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>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 06.07.21 um 06:53 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:<br>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:66a4c893-715d-47c7-b19b-8caf055ce418@Spark">
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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman">Dear typologists,</span><br>
<br>
<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 dir="auto">Ian</div>
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Martin Haspelmath
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