[Lingtyp] Definition of “personal pronoun"

Tue Jul 6 11:26:39 UTC 2021

Dear Guillaume,
demonstratives may modify nouns, whereas personal pronouns may not.

don’t some languages distinguish pronominal demonstratives from adnominal demonstratives? WALS shows that<https://wals.info/feature/42A#2/23.2/152.6> 37 languages use different stems for the two.

Regards,
Ian
On 6 Jul 2021, 6:07 PM +0800, Guillaume Segerer <guillaume.segerer at cnrs.fr>, wrote:

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.

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Regards,
Ian
On 6 Jul 2021, 4:49 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de><mailto: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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