demonstrative or pronoun?

[Olesya Khanina]

Dear David,

the same in Russian

Regards,
Olesya

Siewierska, Anna wrote:
> Dear David,
>
> In Polish you would use the demonstrative, To Jan.
>
> Best
>
> Anna
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG]
> On Behalf Of David Gil
> Sent: 07 August 2009 15:09
> To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
> Subject: demonstrative or pronoun?
>
> 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
>
>   

-- 
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Olesya Khanina (PhD)
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Department of Linguistics
Deutscher Platz 6       phone:    +49 (0) 341 35 50 339
D-04103 Leipzig         fax:      +49 (0) 341 35 50 333
Germany                 e-mail:    khanina at eva.mpg.de
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~khanina/
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