Non-Prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns and Their Grammaticalization in Chinese

Abstract

With an interesting typological study on the non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns, Helmbrecht (2015) demonstrates that the form-meaning mismatch with regards to personal pronouns is essentially based on discourse. It is claimed that the referents of personal pronouns dynamically keep changing with a particular context, and some kind of additional pragmatic meaning tends to be encoded into them. Based on his study, Helmbrecht proposes two hypotheses about how the phenomena at issue could be grammaticalized: (i) Plural pronouns may shift to singular ones; (ii) third-person pronouns may shift to second- or first-person ones, but not vice versa. Drawing on a more comprehensive typological perspective, this article presents various patterns in Mandarin Chinese that supplement Helmbrecht’s generalization and adjust his hypotheses concerning the grammaticalization of personal pronouns (Hu, 2018).