[Lingtyp] Definition of “personal pronoun" Back to basics

JOO, Ian [Student] ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk
Fri Jul 9 09:18:14 UTC 2021


Dear Stéphane,

thank you for your helpful explanation.
However I don’t quite follow the following statement:

That is why the same pronominal form (except for gender agreement when required) is used to refer to all kinds of nouns

Why, among all semantic properties, is gender an exception?
So suppose a certain language uses the same form for all nouns with the same social status, age (relative to the speaker), animacy, distance, etc.
Would such pronoun not fall into the definition of a pronoun because it does not “lack all the semantic richeness of the lexicon”?
If so then why is gender excluded from the “semantic richness”?

Regards,
Ian
On 9 Jul 2021, 5:04 PM +0800, ROBERT Stephane <stephane.robert at cnrs.fr>, wrote:

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