Pronouns

Few grammars acknowledge the full variation in direct object pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which allows for both normative clitic and non-standard tonic variants. Bagno (2009) notes that clitics are not learned naturally, but only once children go to school, implying the “correctness” but also artificial nature of these pronouns. Perini (2010) describes a prescriptive preference for clitic pronouns and negative attitudes towards their tonic counterparts. Nevertheless, no prior studies have investigated empirically speaker evaluations of these competing pronoun variants. Therefore, in this project we created a perception experiment of direct object pronouns in spoken Brazilian Portuguese, in order to investigate the role of attitudes and social evaluations in language variation (cf. Evans & Iverson 2007; Campbell-Kibler 2009). We hypothesized that it would reveal clear patterns of evaluation towards the variants, and specifically that normative clitic forms would be evaluated more negatively than tonic forms.

Data were collected through an online survey on Qualtrics where participants evaluated fictional speakers in terms of six different adjectives (educated, intelligent, formal, friendly, irritating, pedantic), using a five-point Likert scale. These adjectives were used in dos Santos & Mendes’ (2019) study of the BP subjunctive and adapted for our project. Participants evaluated 32 survey items (16 target items, 16 distractors). Target items were presented with 16 scenarios varied according to pronoun type (clitic, tonic), and utterance type (monologue, dialogue), in order to assess the role of the language internal factors in sociolinguistic evaluation, as well as respondent age, gender, socioeconomic class, level of education, and state of origin.

The responses of 160 native Portuguese speakers who completed the survey were analyzed using mixed-effects linear regression in R, with survey item and verb as random effects. The dependent variable, survey respondents’ evaluation of fictional speakers via the previously- mentioned adjectives, was z-score normalized to account for disparate scale usage. The best-fit model of our data selected pronoun type and utterance choice as significant predictors of respondents’ evaluation of speakers. Specifically, fictional speakers are significantly more likely to be evaluated negatively (irritating, pedantic, formal) when using clitic pronouns, as well as of higher education status (educated, intelligent). By contrast, speakers employing tonic pronouns were consistently rated friendlier and less irritating/pedantic than those using clitics. With regard to specific pronouns, clitic nos was evaluated as more irritating than tonic a gente, while the accusative use of lhe received the most negative evaluations. Regarding utterance type, speakers using clitics were rated more negatively in dialogues than in monologues. None of the external factors were significant.

Given the wide gulf between the grammars of normative BP and actual spoken BP, our study provides a new direction for future research on competing grammatical variants in this variety and their subjective evaluation by native speakers. More generally, our results suggest that the role that social evaluation plays in usage preferences should be re-assessed based on studies linking subjective attitudes with grammatical choices (dos Santos & Silva 2019; Squires 2014).

Traditional language acquisition research that employs offline tasks, such as act-out, pointing, sentence-picture matching, truth-value and grammaticality judgments, has established that children up to the age of 6 make mistakes in the comprehension of anaphoric expressions. With the adaptation of the Visual World Eye-Tracking Paradigm (VWP) for language acquisition, it has become possible to investigate the interpretation of anaphoric expressions in children in real time to gain a better understanding of the development of pronominal reference. This chapter provides an overview of the VWP studies of 3- to 9-year-old children’s comprehension of reflexives and personal pronouns in terms of various linguistic constraints and their interaction. There is a developmental trajectory of such constraints, with morphological (gender) and lexico-semantic (verb transitivity) constraints being acquired first, followed by syntactic constraints (Principles A and B of the Binding Theory). Discourse-level constraints, such as information structure and order-of-mention, develop last and often need to be present in combination for children to apply them online.

The present proposal deals with the emergence of three reflexive pronouns in Modern Persian namely, xiš, xištan,and xod (=enclitic pronouns) from possessive adjectives and adverb of emphasis in Old and Middle Persian. Presenting the corpus data, this contribution explores the role of possession as an intensive experience of human in the development, reinforcement and renovation of reflexivity in Old and Middle Persian in addition to the intensification and veracity meaning in Middle Persian which extends to reflexivity both in Middle and Modern Persian. We have concentrated, almost exclusively, on attesting the universal characters of grammaticalization strategies including metaphorical extension, semantic bleaching, and decategorization. Compiling the full range of reflexive constructions in Old Persian and based on Kent (1950:67) the first manifestation of reflection, namely the prefix h uvâ-is a possessive-reflexive adjective of the third person which is found in a few compound words such as: uvâmaršiyuš " owner of self-death (dies by his own hands) " and uvâipašiyam " his own possession ". Further evidence for the assumption that strategies of reflexivization in Persian develop from the nominal source of an owner comes from the second marker of reflexivity attested in Early Middle Persian, the possessive-reflexive xweš with the behavior of possessive adjectives again of the third person (through genitive –eš). Based upon König and Vezzasoi (2004:230) this supports the typological scale of interaction with person: 3>2>1. The extant Old and Early Middle Persian texts provide direct evidence neither on the object (argument) position of transitive verbs filling a valency position through reflexive pronouns, nor on the adjuncts to some noun phrase not expressing co-reference or binding but intensification. However, in order to portray coreferentiality and object position, Late Middle Persian recruits the body term tan in combination with xweš resulting xweštan " body of his own " which in turn depicts the cognitive and linguistic processes at work, metaphorical extension, during the grammaticalization from 'body' to a reflexive marker. Furthermore, the findings of the present analysis indicate that the bleaching of adverbial meaning in the adverb of emphasis xod " truly " in Late Middle Persian (the process of decategorization) leads to a purely syntactic meaning, indicating an emphatic reflexive with both adnominal and adverbial readings. On the basis of New (10 th to 13 th century) and Modern Persian texts, the intensifier xod also comes to be used as a reflexive anaphor. We argue that in order to mark local binding unambiguously in Modern Persian, enclitic pronouns are added to xod. This new strategy (the use of xod-compounds) both in object positions and intensifiers becomes so frequent and ultimately obligatory as a paradigm of inflectional forms (obligatorification, paradigmaticization) that the older ones narrow to literary and formal texts. Finally and concerning different periods of Persian, we propose the following grammaticalization schemata for the development of reflexive pronouns and intensifiers: 1)affixal possessive-reflexive adjective (OP. h uva) > possessive-reflexive adjective (EMP.xweš)>

Son dönemlerde çağdaş Türk dillerinin gramerlerinin karşılaştırmalı şekilde öğrenilmesi ve sözdizimsel unsurlar ile ilgili gereken tesbitlerin yapılması yaygınlaşmıştır. Azerbaycan dilbilgisi kitaplarında sözdizimine ilişkin belirli konularda dilbilimciler arasında birlik sağlandığı hâlde, Türkiye Türkçesi dilbilgisinde dilbilimcilerin belirli konularda ortak bir noktada buluşamamaları, kendi görüşlerini kabul ettirme istekleri, sınıflandırma ve anlatımlarda bireysel ve farklı yaklaşım şekilleri, sözdizimsel unsurların adlandırılması sırasında terim karmaşasına yol açmaları, aynı kavramların dilbilimciler tarafından farklı adlandırılması bazı sorunların ortaya çıkmasına neden olmuştur.
Şunlardan bazılarını aşağıdaki gibi özetleyebiliriz:
-Azerbaycan Türkçesi dilbilgisine göre sözdizimi kelime grupları, cümle ve metinden bahsetmektedir, Türkiye Türkçesi dilbilgisine göre sadece ilk ikisinden bahseder;
-Azerbaycan Türkçesi dilbilgisine göre, kelime öbekleri serbest ve sabit söz birleşmelerine ayrılır.
Sentaksta ise sadece serbest söz birleşmeleri (ad tamlamaları, sıfat tamlamaları, fiilimsi öbekleri) ve onların tarafları arasındaki gramatik ilişkilerinden bahsedilir. Türkiye Türkçesi dil bilgisinde ise kelime öbekleri
"kelime grupları" adı altında incelenmektedir. Ad tamlamaları ve fiilimsi öbekleri ile birlikte, morfolojide  bahsedilmesi gereken konular: birleşik sözcükler, sayı grubu, edat grubu, unvan grubu, ünlem grubu, tekrar
grubu, bağlama grubu da bu bahse dahil edilirken kelimeler arasındaki sözdizimsel ilişkilerden kesinlikle bahsedilmemektedir.
-Azerbaycan Türkçesi dil bilgisine göre, cümle ögelerinin sayısı beş olup, söz dizimi kitaplarının basit cümle bölümünde incelenmekte, adları ve işlevleri genel kabul görmektedir. Türkiye Türkçesi dil bilgisinde ise cümle ögeleri ile ilgili fikir ayrılıklarının olduğu görülmektedir. Sorun sadece dilbilimcilerin cümle ögelerinin sayısının dört, beş veya altı olduğunu iddia etmeleri ile bitmemektedir. Bununla birlikte
onların adlandırılmasında ve cümle içindeki görevlerinin belirlenmesinde karşılaşılan sorunların sayısı da oldukça fazladır.
Azerbaycan Türkçesi dilbilgisine göre birleşik cümleler; bağımsız birleşik cümle ve bağımlı birleşik cümle olmak üzere ikiye ayrılır. Bağımsız birleşik cümleler onu oluşturan basit cümleler arasındaki anlam
ilişkisine, bağımlı birleşik cümleler ise yan cümlenin türüne göre sınıflandırılırken beş farklı türü olduğu bilinir. Burada yan cümle ile ana cümlenin yeri ve yapı özellikleri de dikkate alınır. Türkiye Türkçesi dil
bilgisine göre, birleşik cümlenin "şartlı birleşik cümle", "ki’li birleşik cümle" ve "iç içe birleşik cümle"den oluşan üç türü vardır. Ancak bu sınıflandırma Türkiye Türkçesi’ndeki tüm cümle türlerini kapsamamaktadır. Bu konuda da dilbilimciler arasında görüş ayrılıkları oluşmuş ve bu da birleşik cümle türlerinin belirlenmesi zamanı kavram karmaşasına yol açmaktadır.
Makalemizde de Azerbaycan ve Türkiye Türkçesi dilbilgisi kitaplarında dilin sözdizimsel yapısının öğrenim şeklinden bahsedilecek, konu ile ilgili teklif ve önerilerde bulunulacaktır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Azerbaycan Türkçesi, Türkiye Türkçesi, sözdizimi, yapı

Tato kapitola se zaměřuje na první osobu množného čísla a jiná kolektivní označení, kterými odkazujeme k různým sociálním skupinám a kategoriím. K čemu vlastně zájmena v plurálu a kolektiv-ní označení referují? Co zakládají, reprodukují a implikují? Jak je lidé v praxi používají? Podíváme se, jakými směry se můžeme při hledání odpovědí na podobné otázky ubírat. Oblast svého zájmu zúžíme prostřednictvím pojmu identity (zejména tzv. kolektivní identity), který patří mezi nejrozšířenější způsoby, jak se v současnosti sociologové (ale nejen oni) snaží problematiku reflektované skupinové příslušnosti uchopit a konceptualizovat.

Variation is seldom paid attention to in language teaching and mediation. On the basis of noun classes, of noun phrases as well as of the different forms displayed by the demonstrative and the relative pronoun in dependence of noun phrases the focus of this contribution will be on the perspective offered by variation which certainly presents a number of difficulties in language teaching, while at the same time it can increase the learners' self-confidence thanks to a deeper metalinguistic analysis.

While matrix clauses pronouns are almost never dropped in matrix clauses in Russian, silent pronouns are licensed in almost all kinds of embedded clauses. Null pronouns in such positions share similarities with PRO, but they also differ from PRO in many respects. In this paper, I show that there are two kinds of environments in which such pronouns can appear. The first kind of environment includes complements of attitude verbs, where there is strong evidence for a syntactic relation between the null pronoun and its antecedent. In the second kind of environment, which includes sentential adjuncts and embedded wh-questions, the nature of this relation seems to be different. I propose that Russian possesses a minimally specified silent pronoun which is phonologically deficient and must cliticize onto a higher projection and thus can only be found in the presence of an overt complementizer. I adopt the proposed in Holmberg (2005) that a major feature of pro-drop phenomena is the valuation of the D feature of the null pronoun. I propose that in Russian the null pronoun is unable to value this feature inside the clause where it is merged and therefore needs to probe outside the clause to get the D feature valued. The difference between properties of silent pronouns in the two kinds of environments is derived from the exact mechanism by which the valuation takes place. In the case of complements of attitude verbs, the valuation takes place as a result of an agree relation, in other cases the valuation takes place via a topic-chain.

English: The current study focuses on the grammatical category of person inherent to personal pronouns in Russian and Bulgarian. Even though some Bulgarian parts of speech (mostly verbs, for example) have significant differences in comparison with Russian ones, the systems of
meanings of the Bulgarian and Russian pronomina personalia function in a similar way. Additionally, the subject of examination is the set of categorial and non-categorial meanings of the grammatical category of person. The two semantic types are invariably connected but the emphasis is put on the manifestations of non-categoriality. Bulgarian serves as a background to Russian empirical data, and the main approach used is a comparative one. The main goal is to explain and describe the ways in which the non-categorial meanings of person function in Russian. For this purpose, fi rst categorial meanings are examined and then non-categorical ones are reviewed.

Russian: Объектом настоящего исследования является грамматическая категория лица, присущая личным местоимения в русском и болгарском языках. Несмотря на то, что у некоторых классов слов в болгарском языке (например, у глагола) наблюдаются значительные различия в категориях по сравнению с русским языком, системы значений болгарских и русских pronomina personalia функционируют схожим образом. Предметом исследования являются категориальные и некатегориальные значения категории лица местоимений. Эти два семантических типа неразрывно связаны друг с другом, но акцент делается на проявлениях некатегориальности. Болгарский язык имеет статус языка фонового сопоставления с русским эмпирическим материалом, а основной метод работы – сопоставительный. Основная цель исследования – объяснить и описать случаи функционирования некатегориальных значений лица в русском языке. В связи с этим сначала рассматриваются категориальные значения, а потом и некатегориальные.

Among the seventeen languages spoken in the Banks and Torres groups of north Vanuatu, eleven share a TAM category whose functions include sequential, generic, subjunctive, prospective and imperfective. This aspect, labeled here “aorist”, also displays cross-linguistic formal similarities: everywhere, the aorist marker shows allomorphic variation depending on the person of the subject. After comparing the eleven languages concerned, I propose to reconstruct their protosystem as a set of four portmanteau proclitics {*gu–*u–*ni–*(k)a} combining aspect and person.

One central strand of analyses of the 'generic' or 'quasi-universal' interpretation of impersonal pronouns involves treating them as featurally impoverished pronouns which act as variables bound by a generic operator either high in the clause (Molt-mann 2006, SigurDsson and Egerland 2009, a.o.) or at the top of the DP (Ackema and Neeleman 2016b). In this paper, I will introduce a new pronominal form man in Multicultural London English (MLE), and give compelling evidence from its unique properties that the Gn-binding analysis of generic readings for impersonal pronouns cannot extend to this pronoun: the pronoun never behaves as a bound variable, and so it could not reasonably be assumed that a generic operator can bind it. I argue that the properties of the pronoun can be explained instead by positing a featureless person head, which introduces the full lattice of the person ontology (following Harbour In Press), and then allowing contextually determined subsets of that full lattice to be picked out by a choice function, modelled on the epsilon operator of von Heusinger (2004). This novel data from MLE suggests that generic-like interpretations can arise even where generic binding is not possible, but that both strategies of generating these interpretations are needed to capture the full typology.

ABSTRACT It is well known that women lead language change in monolingual settings, but this women effect has not been thoroughly investigated for bilingual settings where factors such as language contact come into play. This study examines an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC) having to do with the alternation between expression and omission of subject personal pronouns with tensed verbs (e.g. canto ~ yo canto, 'I sing'). Bivariate and multivariate analyses of 116 NYC Spanish speakers' pronoun use show that Latin American women are ahead of men with respect to both increasing rates of pronoun use and desensitization to the impact of switch-reference on pronoun use. It is suggested that the female lead among Latin American immigrants is due to extensive intergenerational contact between women and their high-pronoun using bilingual children.

As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this paper, we present an analysis of non-binary singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine. Despite singular they’s widespread usage and long history in English, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified, generic, or otherwise gender non-specific contexts, and even if they produce the latter sort of examples natively. We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers’ level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they’s most recent broadening – that is, as a non-binary singular pronoun of reference – dovetailing with wider socio-cultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgements. As we aim to show, linguists from all subdisciplines – both theoretical and applied – are especially well suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.

Статья посвящена исследованию группы не полностью грамматикализованных местоимений – составных неопределенных местоимений (СНМ). Подобные единицы очень редко становятся предметом описания в грамматиках и исследованиях по неопределенности. На украинском языковом материале рассмотрена формальная и семантическая структура этих элементов, источники их грамматикализации, а также вопросы отграничения данной группы местоимений. Кроме того, в статье предложен корпусно-лингвистический метод, позволяющий систематически обнаруживать маркеры неопределенности СНМ и представляются результаты такого анализа.

Стаття присвячена дослідженню групи не повністю граматикалізованих неозначених займенників, а саме складених неозначених займенників (СНЗ), яким в граматичних довідниках і наукових роботах про неозначеність приділено мало уваги. На українському мовному матеріалі розглянуто формальну та семантичну структуру цих елементів, джерела їхньої граматикалізації та питання розмежування цієї групи займенників. Крім того, запропоновано корпусно-лінгвістичний метод, який уможливлює систематичне виявлення індикаторів неозначеності, наведено результати такого аналізу.

The article focuses on a group of not fully grammaticalized indefinite pronouns – the compound indefinite pronouns (ICPs). These ICPs enjoy little attention in grammar handbooks and research papers on indefiniteness. Based on the Ukrainian material, I examine the formal and semantic structure of these items, the source constructions for their grammaticalization and the problem of demarcation of the group. In addition, I propose the corpus-linguistic method, which makes possible a systematic detection of indefiniteness markers, and present the results of such an analysis.

This paper discusses pronominal clitics in Ketama Berber (Western Rif, Morocco). Ketama Berber is usually considered as a variety of Senhaja Berber. It is the westernmost and the most divergent Senhaja variety. The paper is based on fieldwork data collected by the author during several fieldwork trips in 2013-2016 and on Lafkioui 2007. After a general introduction to Ketama Berber (Section 1), its pronominal clitics are discussed (Section 2): clitic pronouns of the direct object (Section 2.1) and of the indirect object (Section 2.2). Special forms of clitic pronouns and their origins are explained. Clitic pronouns in Ketama/Senhaja are compared with Ghomara (based on Mourigh 2015) and Tarifit (based on Lafkioui 2007). Section 3 draws conclusions and summarizes the study.

The Danish pronoun de and its inflections are traditionally described as 3rd person plural, but, as this article demonstrates, it is also used as a gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun. As this pronoun - termed singular de - has not been documented or described in the literature thus far, the purpose of this article is to provide a grammatical description and analysis of singular de and its referential use in interaction. This is based on 104 occurrences of singular de in naturally occurring conversation. It is found that singular de is used with both generic and specific reference, and that interlocutors may use singular de to avoid indexing gender and orienting to it as a relevant topic in talk-in-interaction (gender-unspecified reference) or to index the referent's gender as neither male nor female (gender-specified reference). The article also parallels between singular de and English singular they, as well as sociolinguistic variation in the use of singular de which could be topics for future studies.

The pronouns found in the languages are mostly different. Although there are some that are the same, and others that exhibited a process which resulted to some phoneme differences, most pronouns are different even if one can trace the processes occurred. These are most evident in personal pronouns of both languages which would most likely to become cognate for they have the same characteristics and processes, but slightly different in form, maybe because of innovations. Unlike personal pronouns, you may not find noticeable similarity in the demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, and there are pronouns in a language which are not present in the other. There are more differences than similarities in both languages in terms of pronouns, thus making them unintelligible to the speakers.
Syntax and the semantics of pronouns in both languages exhibit the same functions.
If pronouns are the only factors in determining if the two languages are closely related, then the languages are quite distant from each other. Most pronouns are different, and it would be best to analyze the Kapampangan dialect in the same neighbourhood, to see if there has been influenced in both languages.

There are many personal pronouns in Japanese, and we use them in our daily lives depending on our position and relationship with others. How characters in games use personal pronouns is also determined by the various attributes that each character possesses. This study examines the correlation between the two in otome games released between 2017 and 2021. The study used correspondence analysis to examine the attributes of the main male characters and the patterns of personal pronouns they used, based on a crosstabulation table created from data for approximately 500 characters. Comparing the results with those for characters in women's novels published during the same period, we found that there were significantly more personal pronouns used in otome games than in novels, and that personal pronouns with the same sound but different kanji and kana spellings were independently influenced by character attributes.

This study contributes to the documentation and description of the diversity of Kalahari Khoe languages in eastern Botswana. Kalahari Khoe languages have highly complex pronominal systems with extensive paradigms of portmanteau morphemes encoding person, gender, and number categories. This study focuses on Thabala Tchoe, an entirely undocumented Kalahari Khoe language. Features of the Thabala Tchoe pronominal system set it apart from descriptions of closely and more distantly related languages. In this paper, I offer a formal and functional analysis of these features, which include honorifi c and focus sensitive pronouns, and innovative forms which offer contemporary evidence for the historical development of the complex pronominal system. This analysis is explored against the background of historical contact patterns between different Kalahari Khoe speech communities and Tswana merafe, or 'clans', in region.

This paper focuses on the two usages of Japanese second person pronouns, for example "anta", "omae", "kimi", that occur in natural conversation. Firstly, the usage where a second person pronoun follows an address term occurs when there are some differences between reality and the presumption that the speaker has, and when the speaker experiences mostly negative emotions. Secondly, a single second person pronoun used as an isolated unit does not directly point to the real hearer in conversation, but instead sets the situation for use of that pronoun, shows positive attitude toward the hearer and makes him involved in the situation. These pronouns create negative and positive effects in conversation, because they dynamically change their connotation depending on the context.

Книга посвящена проблеме когнитивных истоков языковой катего-ризации; в ней рассматривается комплекс вопросов, связанных с общей проблемой представления знаний в языке. На конкретном материале показывается феноменологический характер базовых когнитивных структур пространства и времени, участвующих в формировании языковой картины мира. Предлагается когнитивная модель категории вида в русском языке, анализируется эпистемическое соотношение именной и местоименной систем.

There seems a common belief in the fields of linguistics and computer-mediated communication that conversation done on instant messenger resembles spoken language. This common belief is challenged by the findings of this dissertation. The research within documents qualitative and quantitative analysis on the doing of back-channelling, adjective-intensification and personal reference by participants of the study; six graduate males in their early twenties, located in Greater Manchester. Utilising a corpus of 6971 words, the study contrasts the participants’ language production in both WhatsApp conversation and face-to-face conversation. To conclude that WhatsApp is not speech-like, the study finds that: back-channelling is done in both WhatsApp conversation and face-to-face conversation by the studies’ participants, however its form in the two mediums is dissimilar; adjective-intensification in the study takes a different form in the two mediums and is much more common in WhatsApp conversation; the doing of personal reference by participants of the study is much more common in face-to-face conversation than WhatsApp conversation, and its distribution of grammatical person in the two mediums is also a source of disparity.

Among other topics, the investigation reviews literature on the study of and differences between speech and writing, computer-mediated communication and problems related to its prior study, existing studies on instant messenger communications, and WhatsApp. This dissertation answers a call for further research into CMC which is more user and medium specific in its claims. It part-fills the vast gap in understanding related to conversation on WhatsApp. The research finds shortcomings in current linguistic understanding by finding evidence to suggest that back-channelling is a linguistic phenomenon not only limited to spoken language.