demonstrative or pronoun?

[Silvia Luraghi]

Hi,
in Italian the appropriate construction would be:
sono Giovanni
i.e. no subject, but verb inflected in the first person singular.
Especially in contex A,
è Giovanni
is also acceptable, i.e. verb in the third person 
singular. In no case would the occurrence of any 
type of subject make an acceptable construction.
cheers
Silvia

At 16.09 07/08/2009, David Gil wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>Consider the following very similar contexts;
>
>Context A:
>John and Bill are friends.  John calls Bill on a 
>landphone; it's a bad line, Bill doesn't know 
>who is speaking; John tries to identify himself 
>(using a predicate nominal construction)...
>
>Context B:
>John and Bill are friends.  John sends Bill a 
>text message from a new number that Bill is 
>unfamiliar with; John identifies himself (using 
>a predicate nominal construction)...
>
>My question:
>
>In languages that you are familiar with, in the 
>above contexts, is the subject of the predicate 
>nominal construction a demonstrative or a 1st pronoun pronoun?
>
>In English, the subject is a demonstrative; the 
>pronoun is infelicitous in the given context:
>
>This is John
>#I am John
>
>But in Indonesian, the subject is most commonly 
>a pronoun, though a demonstrative is also possible:
>
>Ini John [less common]
>Aku John
>
>I am curious to know what happens in other 
>languages.  (I have a hunch that the 
>availability of the "pronominal subject" option 
>in Indonesian is correlated with the 
>questionable status of pronouns as a discrete 
>grammatical category in Indonesian, but this 
>hunch is easily testable with a bit of cross-linguistic data.)
>
>Note: I don't expect to find differences between 
>the two contexts; I provided both just in order 
>to make the situation more natural to as many respondents as possible.
>
>Thanks,
>
>David
>
>--
>David Gil
>
>Department of Linguistics
>Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
>
>Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
>Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
>Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

Silvia Luraghi
Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata
Università di Pavia
Strada Nuova 65
I-27100 Pavia
telef.: +39-0382-984685
fax: +39-0382-984487