[Lingtyp] Definition of “personal pronoun"

Tue Jul 6 10:05:46 UTC 2021

Dear all

The following may be trivial considerations, but :

- the expression "personal pronoun" contains the word "pronoun", which 
in principle means an element that stands for a noun but that is not a 
(proper) noun (thus excluding brother, Dad, Mum, Ian etc.); the word 
"personal" evokes what we generally consider as "persons", i.e. speech 
act participants as well as "3rd persons".

- there is a kind of tradition to limit the notion of "person" to human 
beings. This is in contradiction with the fact that "it" may be 
considered a personal pronoun (I would simply call it a pronoun). This 
tradition is especially useful in noun class languages, where 'it' can 
have many different forms. In many of these languages, the 3rd person 
animate/human behaves differently from others in at least a few contexts.

- in many descriptions, one find personal indices included in the 
"personal pronouns" chart. Despite the fact that these are not really 
pronouns, it is again useful to present the whole paradigms of personal 
markers. Therefore, the expression "personal markers" is more 
appropriate here.

- the question of delimiting personal pronouns from demonstratives does 
not seem that difficult at first sight: demonstratives may modify nouns, 
whereas personal pronouns may not. In some languages of course, there 
may be no difference between possessive pronouns and possessive 
modifiers, but that can be viewed as a case of polyfunctionality.

Best,

Guillaume

Le 06/07/2021 à 11:03, JOO, Ian [Student] a écrit :
> Dear Martin,
>
> thank you for your definition.
> But as for (b), Korean can express (i) with any noun:
>
>     (b) "Does mom/dad/brother/Ian(i) think that mom/dad/brother/Ian(i)
>     has an answer?"
>
> So that would classify any noun as a pronoun.
> The difficulty of defining a personal pronoun seems to suggest that 
> it’s not a good category to begin with. Perhaps “definite pronoun”, 
> including “personal pronouns” and demonstratives, would be a clearer 
> category? It would be typologically more meaningful since many 
> languages don’t distinguish demonstratives from (3sg) personal pronouns.
> I’m trying to make cross-linguistic matrices of personal pronouns (see 
> below), and for the moment I’m including demonstratives in the matrices.
>
>
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 6 Jul 2021, 4:49 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath 
> <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
>> 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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