"pronoun" is semantic or distributional?

[Larry Trask]

Pat Ryan writes:

>  But, I would ask Larry if, given the analysis above, 'pronominal' is
>  inappropriate to distinguish 'my' from 'this' etal., what would be the
>  appropriate term? Certainly, I do not believe anyone will easily agree that
>  there is no discernible difference between 'my' and 'this' etal.

There is no difference in the syntax, which is all that matters for
part-of-speech assignments.  There are semantic differences, of course,
but these are of no relevance for assignment to syntactic classes.

There are enormous semantic differences among 'dog', 'arrival' and
'colorlessness', but all are nouns, regardless, because they all behave
like nouns.

>  Certainly,
>  'possessive', the term Larry employs in his published definition is
>  unproblematical so far as I can see but is it entirely without merit to
>  identify the substitutional  difference between words like 'my' and 'this'?

And what 'substitutional difference' would that be?

The problem with 'pronominal determiner' is not so much that it's intrinsically
inappropriate -- though it is -- but that it is not in use.  Pretty much
everybody calls 'my' a possessive determiner, so why not just accept
this standard piece of terminology?

>  A more troublesome omission(?) in Larry's definifitions concerns words like
>  'mine', which he has assured us in a recent posting are 'pronouns'. But
>  under his published definition of 'pronoun', we find only personal,
>  reflexive, demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, and relative --- listed
>  as categories.

>  Larry, under which of these categories does 'mine' belong?

None, probably.  I probably would have been wise to make it clear that my
list was not meant to be exhaustive, but I see now that my wording is
unfortunate.  Thanks for pointing that out.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk