DGS2 chapter 8 - Pronouns (Version: September 2025)

It is a well-established fact that several Eurasian languages and language families show conspicuous formal similarities in their systems of personal pronouns. These similarities have been cited in support of a common genetic origin of all the languages concerned, but they have also been explained by assuming a combination of mutual contacts and shared structural tend encies. The similarities exhibited by the pronominal systems of the so-called Core Altaic families (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic) are, however, more specific and call for a more focused examination. The present paper discusses this issue with a view on possible genetic and nongenetic explanations.

2024

We analyze referential choice in Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language with consistent head-marking, focusing on the use of independent pronouns in a small corpus of recorded narratives. We show that first and second person pronouns are employed in Abaza for introducing the relevant referents into discourse as well as in situations of topic shift. Forms that morphologically look like third person pronouns are rather used as intensifiers, while the true anaphoric function is performed by demonstratives. The latter tend to occur after the relevant referent is introduced into the discourse by a full noun phrase and before it is established as a protagonist subsequently referred to by pronominal affixes alone. Our results show that the patterns of use of independent pronouns in languages with pronominal affixes both conform to cross-linguistic tendencies and display a number of special features possibly related to their non-default status.

fsu.edu

2021

This paper solves the longstanding puzzle of what speakers of ancient Hebrew meant when employing the pronouns אָנֹכִי versus אֲנִי to refer to themselves. After noting the distribution of these two forms in cognate and nearby languages, we consider the basic communicative needs between a speaker and an audience. This leads to the prediction that the long-form pronoun signals that the speaker’s presence in the situation under discussion is somehow at issue. In contrast, the short form treats the speaker’s situatedness within the discourse as a given. We validate this prediction via various tests. The consistency of findings across a wide range of speakers and books confirms that the distinction between the two pronoun forms is meaningful and a feature of the language as a whole. We conclude that our hypothesis fits the biblical data better, and yields a more coherent and informative biblical text, than explanations proposed by Driver, Cassuto, Rosén, and Revell.

Proceedings of the international workshop Personal pronouns in Niger-Congo languages, 2010

Geregory Chambon et al. (eds.), De l'argile au numérique. Mélanges assyriologiques en l'honneur de Dominique Charpinr, 2019

The realization that morphophonemic changes known from living languages were operative in Sumerian as well has important implications for understanding the phonology and morphology of this dead language. In light of comparative evidence it is likely, for instance, that the 2nd person agent/object marker of Sumerian, appearing in Late Sumerian as /e/ and in earlier texts as a long vowel, actually is the same pronominal element [s] that was realized as /r/ in the dative infix of the verb and as /z/ in the personal and possessive pronoun. There are other cases of morphophonemic change in the nominal and verbal inflexion of Sumerian, which are briefly discussed and interpreted phonologically in the light of comparative linguistic evidence, and their relevance for the understanding of Sumerian phonology and grammar is tentatively outlined.

2014

The article is focused on internal reconstructions of partial microsystems of first and second person pronouns in all individual branches of Indo-European languages, projecting them back to the late Indo-European protolanguage. The next step was reconstruction of the primary pro¬nominal protosystem, allowing us both to deduce forms of pronouns in historically attested languages and to understand pronominal-verbal congruence, assumed as the axiomatic starting point.

The paper explores the syntax of Hittite indefinite pronouns. It is universally accepted that indefinite pronouns are preverbal. Whereas this is certainly true, the real distribution is shown to be much more complex. I particularly analyze the placement of indefinite pronouns vis-à-vis preverbs, contrastive focus, verbs and negation. I also systematically confront behavior of indefinite NP (" a man "), on the one hand, and indefinite pronouns (" someone ")/indefinite pronouns + NP (" some man "), on the other, and show that they behave differently in syntactic terms contra existing accounts of Luraghi (1990) or Huggard (2014; 2015). Finally, clause second position of indefinite pronouns 1 is explored. I argue that it is a post-OH phenomenon due to the analogy from relative pronouns and subordinators like kuit " as " .

2021