Modality on Pronouns

[Daniel L. Everett]

I am posting this on behalf of Nigel Vincent:


"Dan's posting looks to be more like inflections on
pronouns rather than nouns. It reminds me of the
analysis proposed by Julia Barron in a paper in
'Linguistics' 36 (1998) 223-251 in which she treated
English contractions like "I'll", "she's" etc as
inflected pronouns. Since some of the items that enter
into such contractions are modals, that would also
provide a source of modally inflected (pro)nominals.
Nigel"