[Lingtyp] Definition of “personal pronoun"

[Martin Haspelmath]

Maybe the following will work:

"A personal pronoun is a free form that (i) denotes a speech role 
(speaker/producer and/or hearer/comprehender) OR that is used as an 
anaphoric form AND (ii) that can be used in a complement clause 
coreferentially with a matrix clause argument."

This is a disjunctive definition that brings together locuphoric forms 
('I', 'we', 'you') and 3rd-person anaphoric (or "endophoric") forms, 
following the Western tradition (but not following any kind of 
compelling logic).

It seems that personal pronouns need to be delimited from three types of 
somewhat doubtful forms:

– person indexes (I do not include bound forms under "personal pronoun" 
here, following my 2013 paper on person indexes: 
https://zenodo.org/record/1294059)
– demonstratives
– titles like "Your Majesty"

I think that if a language has a form like "that-one" or "your-majesty" 
that can be used coreferentially in a complement clause, one will regard 
it as a personal pronoun:

(a) "My sister(i) thinks that that-one(i) has an answer."
(b) "Does your-majesty(i) think that your-majesty(i) has an answer?"

In German, the polite second-person pronoun "Sie" (which has 
Third-Person syntax) can be used in (b), but the demonstrative "die" can 
hardly be used in (a), so it would not count as a personal pronoun 
(yet). However, in Hindi-Urdu and Mongolian, as mentioned by Ian, the 
demonstrative can be used in this way (I think), so it would count as a 
personal pronoun.

I don't think we need the general notion of "person" to define "personal 
pronoun". Wikipedia's current definition is therefore quite confusing 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun).

Thanks for this interesting challenge, Ian! It seems to me that quite a 
few of our traditional terms CAN be defined, but their definitions are 
not obvious at all (and the textbooks don't usually give the definitions).

Best,
Martin

Am 06.07.21 um 06:53 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
> Dear typologists,
>
> I’m having a hard time trying to find a definition of a “personal 
> pronoun”.
> One definition is that a personal pronoun refers to a literal person, 
> a human being. But then again, non-human pronouns like English 
> /it/ are also frequently included as a personal pronoun.
> Another definition seems to be that “personal” refers to a grammatical 
> person and not a literal person. Thus, /it/ refers to the (non-human) 
> 3rd person, therefore it is a personal pronoun.
> But then again, demonstratives, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns 
> also refer to the 3rd person. (This /is/ a book, who /is /that man, 
> anything /is /possible) Then are they also personal pronouns?
> What’s the clearest definition of a personal pronoun, if any?
>
> From Hong Kong,
> Ian
>
>
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
https://www.shh.mpg.de/employees/42385/25522

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