Syllabicity

[Steven Schaufele]

Patrick C. Ryan wrote:

>> A pronoun is a pro-noun. It can be put in any position syntactically
>> in which a noun can be employed. To say that pronouns do not "act
>> like nouns" is completely unjustified!

to which Nik Taylor responded:

> Not entirely so.  One cannot say, for example, *the he.  To the best of
> my knowledge, of languages with articles, none of them use them with
> pronouns.  In addition, pronouns usually (always?) cannot have
> non-predicate adjectives, "old man" is acceptable, "old he" is not.

>From the point of view of syntactic/grammatical theory, pronouns are
routinely treated not as pro-`nouns' but as pro-NPs.  Hence the
difficulty of collocating them with adjectives or determiners, since in
constructions like `the old man' `the' and `old' are assumed to be
*inside* the NP.  If you mention an old man early in a discourse context
and later refer to that same old man as `he', `he' is replacing the
entire NP `an/the old man', not simply the noun `man'.

>From this point of view, the one pronominal element that in normal
English usage is literally a pro-`noun' is the indefinite `one', as in
`the one i saw yesterday'; `the *old* one (as opposed to the young
one)'; etc.

Best,
Steven
--
Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw
Fax: (886)(02)2881-7609
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