Question about pronouns in English, Norwegian and Danish [longish post]

[Tania Strahan]

Hi,
I'm trying to work out what to do with pronouns, in English and the
Scandinavian languages, and I have two main issues I want to explain, but am
a little flummoxed by.

Firstly, pronoun determiners.

Norwegian: 
1. den mann 'DEF man'
2. den mann-en 'DEM man-DEF'
3. Han/*ham (*den) mann-en er snill. he/*him man-DEF is nice

Danish: 
1. den dame 'DEF woman'
2. *den damen 'DEM woman-DEF'
3. *Hun/hende damen er god. *she/her woman-DEF is good

Okay, so this is somewhat simplified, but basically: 
1. In both Danish and Norwegian, if you have a definite article in front of
a noun, you can't also have the definite article suffix. 
2. If you have the (homophonous) demonstrative, then in Norwegian you must
have the definite suffix (morphological agreement), while in Danish you can't. 
3. But, when you have the pronoun determiner (which semantically selects a
specific referent), there's a difference. In Norwegian the pronoun is
clearly a demonstrative, since it requires the definite suffix like other
demonstratives, and can't co-occur with other demonstratives. But in Danish
you also get the definite suffix, which you can't get with other
demonstratives or definite articles. Also, some (Danish, Norweigan and
Swedish) dialects allow you have to have the pronoun determiner with another
definite determiner, not just the suffix version:

Vestjysk Danish: hin æ damen 'her the woman'
Lappträsk Swedish: mett te stór hús-e 'my DEF big house-DEF'

So, my questions are: 

1. Just what word class do pronouns belong to, and can this vary between
even closely related languages? 
2. Is the difference in the definiteness marking on the noun in Norwegian
and Danish a difference that is specified in the a-structure for third
person pronouns, or is there some other way of explaining this? (Do pronouns
have an 'a-structure'?)


Secondly, pronouns that are modified, with adjuncts(?) and PPs.

Norwegian is (semi?) famous for allowing pronouns to be modified by PPs,
which English is normally cited as disallowing; witness the ungrammaticality
of the free translation:

Det er han store/der borte/med grønt hår/i frakken/i midten/eg snakka med i
går... som sa at ho skulle komma til festen min.
'It is he big/over there/with green hair/in the coat/in the middle/I spoke
with yesterday... who said that she would come to party my.'

Any or all of these options are possible in Norwegian (in this order), all
?headed by 'han' (subject form of 3ps pronoun). Notice that *ham store/med
grønt hår with the object form 'him' is ungrammatical.

So, either there's a headless NP here, which leaves the same problem as
above, namely, what exactly is the pronoun, or the pronoun heads some phrase
that's being modified.

I think a related issue is case-marking, since I find the above 'free
translation' fine with 'him' instead of 'he' (not with an adjective, but
with PPs and other phrases). In addition, I think the following are fine
(please note that I am Australian, and I believe New Zealanders get the same
judgments as Autralians on this matter).

4. (looking at a photo): I went to school with him in the middle.
5. Who's coming to your party?
   a. He/*Him is.
   b. *He/Him.
   c. *He/Him standing over there.
   d. *He/Him with the funny hair.

6. ?It was him who took it. (It's 'okay', but I'd rather say just 'He
took it' here.)
7. It was bloody him who went and took the last bit of pavlova.
8. It was bloody him with the stupid grin on his face who went and took
the last bit of pavlova.

Okay, so my point here is that pronouns can be modified in English, at least
in some varieties. My questions are:

3. How do we explain the link between the 'default' case marking and the
ability to be modified in English (and possible Scandinavian/Germanic
languages)? (I don't think this is related to the French strong pronouns, by
the way.)
4. Do the rules for 'pronouns' need to be changed, or the rules for whether
Norwegian, Danish and (Antipodean) English 'ho/hende/han/ham/she/he' are
always pronouns need to be changed?
5. What does an f-structure for sentence like 8. look like?? I've plugged it
into the XLE Web Interface, but it just thinks that pronouns are always
fragments (in the Norwegian version too).

Thanks for any help you can offer!
Tania