demonstrative or pronoun?

[Edith Moravcsik]

In Hungarian, it would be very odd to use the demonstrative. Rather, you
would say "John am" - i.e., you would use your name and then the first
person singular form of the verb 'to be'.
Or you would say (on the phone): "here John speaks" (where 'speaks' is in
the third person singular form).

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion List for ALT [mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG] On
Behalf Of David Gil
Sent: Friday, August 07, 2009 9:09 AM
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

-- 
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/