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<p>Dear all,</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>At this point of the (very general) discussion, I think it can be helpful for Ian to go back to one or two original mistakes or confusions he made in the way he started the discussion. These pertains essentially to the disctinction between morphosyntactic
categories and semantic categories or classes.<br>
</p>
<div><br>
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<div>1) Ian, "personal pronouns" cannot be simply assimilitated to or constrasted with "demonstratives" and "interrogatives" (or indefinite pronouns).<br>
</div>
<div>cf. "<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">But then again, demonstratives, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns also refer to the 3rd person".</span><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Demonstratives or interrogatives refer each to some classes of terms sharing some specific (and distinctive)
<i>semantic</i> properties (deictic pointing vs. interrogative value) which are absent from personal pronouns, even for the 3rd (and only problematic) "person".</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Moreover, these terms (demonstratives and interrogatives, and also indefinite) do not refer by themselves to morphosyntactic categories: e.g. demonstratives (as well as interrogatives) have pronominal vs. modifying (i.e. modifying a noun) and also adverbial
USES (<i>there, where ?</i>), which means that they can be used in different <i>
morphosyntactic categories</i>. <br>
</div>
<div>NB. Depending on the language, a same or a different form is used in these different syntactic uses:
<br>
</div>
<div>e.g. same form in Wolof:</div>
<div><i>xaj</i> 'dog', <i>xaj <b>boobu</b></i><b></b> 'this dog (mentioned previously)',
<b></b><i><b>boobu</b></i> 'this (previously mentioned) one' (talking about a dog)<br>
</div>
<div>e.g. different forms in French:</div>
<div><i>chien</i> 'dog', <i><b>ce</b> chien</i> <span>'this dog', <i></i><b><i>celui-ci</i></b> 'this one'</span><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So demonstrative pronouns (and others) always <u>refer</u> to a "3rd person" in a broad sense of a non-dialogic person or referent but<i> they are not personal pronouns</i>, their semantics is different: the access to the referent is construed in different
ways in each case (more simple or direct in the case of the personal pronoun).<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>2) You again mix up referential value and morphosyntactic categories in your answer to Martin:<br>
</div>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">But as for (b), Korean can express (i) with any noun:</span>
<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?"<br>
<span style="font-family:Times New Roman">So that would classify any noun as a pronoun.</span><br>
</span></blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Of course not. You cannot base your definition of a morphosyntactic category on the translation of a construction from one language to another. As Guillaume Segerer reminded us : a pronoun (be it personal or demonstrative or anything else) stands
<i>for </i>a noun (it is a pro-noun), it is NOT a noun. <br>
</div>
<div>That is : a pronoun lacks all the semantic richness of the lexicon (what I have called the 'semantic depth') and also often displays different syntactic properties. It is a discursive index targeting an element (previously expressed by a noun) in the discourse.
That is why the <b>same</b> pronominal form (except for gender agreement when required) is used to refer to all kinds of nouns (e.g.
<i>mom, dad, brother, Ian.</i>...).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>In the type of construction above, German use a personal pronoun but Korean repeats the noun. This does not mean that all nouns qualifiy as pronouns but that Korean does not use pronouns in this constructions, and maybe does not 3rd person pronouns (?).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I hope this helps.</div>
<div><br>
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<div>Best</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Stéphane</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size: 9pt;">Stéphane Robert</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: 9pt;">CNRS-LLACAN</span><br>
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<div><a href="https://llacan.cnrs.fr/p_robert.php" class="OWAAutoLink" id="LPlnk313079" previewremoved="true"><span style="font-size: 9pt;">https://llacan.cnrs.fr/p_robert.php</span></a><br>
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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>
<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: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>
<br>
<img style="max-width:100.0%; height:auto" src="cid:E2530C591C8E49D9AB00BD45CD312A03"></div>
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<div><br>
Regards,
<div>Ian</div>
</div>
<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>
<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" target="_blank" id="LPlnk769330" previewremoved="true">
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" target="_blank" id="LPlnk362331" previewremoved="true">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>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 06.07.21 um 06:53 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:</div>
<blockquote>
<div>
<div><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>
</div>
<div><br>
>From Hong Kong,
<div>Ian</div>
</div>
<br>
<a href="http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp" target="_blank"></a></blockquote>
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