demonstrative or pronoun?

[Dolgor Guntsetseg]

Dear David, (if I may)

In Mongolian (Khalkha), we only use the pronoun in both context as here:

Bi John baina.
I John be-NPST (non-past)

or the name as a subject like here:

John baina.
John be-NPST

The use of demonstrative is ungrammatical at all.

Best regards,
Gunne (full name: Dolgor Guntsetseg)



Olesya Khanina schrieb:
> 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
>>
>>   
>