demonstrative or pronoun?

[Hakyung Jung]

Hi, David.

In Korean "I" is usually used in both contexts (pro-drop is possible
but less preferable):

Na John-iya
I    John-copular suffix

Best,
Hakyung

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 11:09 PM, David Gil<gil at eva.mpg.de> 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/
>