Pronouns in the System of Parts of Speech

Abstract

There are no school and university grammars on Indo-European (I-E) and Turkic languages, as well as no studies on the theory of parts of speech, in which the problem of pronouns is regarded from various perspectives. This class of words does not have a general semantic feature that is characteristic of all its categories, as is the case in other auto semantic parts of speech – nouns and verbs. It is not possible to specify syntactic functions that are common to all pronouns. Their morphological and paradigmatic characteristics are also heterogeneous. For example, personal pronouns have a declension paradigm that is not represented in other parts of speech. Their distinctive feature is suppletion within the case paradigm. The analysis of grammatical studies shows that there are significant differences in the definition of the quantitative composition and nomenclature of pronouns both within the same language of different authors, and in different languages in typological terms. Significant quantitative differences are revealed between different categories of this part of speech in all the languages under analysis – from 1 to 77. There are no clear boundaries between pronouns proper and the so-called pronominal words. The article presents a typological description of the types of morphological structure of all categories of pronouns in different languages. The classifications of the categories of pronouns are contradictory. Thus, the status of the so-called reflexives is defined differently: some linguists consider them as amplifying forms of personal pronouns, while others grant them the status of an independent category. In typological terms the indefinite pronoun they in English, man in German, on in French and their grammatical equivalent in Russian – the form of the 3rd person plural are of great interest. The paper also reveals the inverse relationship between the morphological structure and the one or multi-meaning of pronouns, namely: the simpler the morphological structure of a unit, the more multifunctional it is, and, vice versa, the more complex the morphological structure is, the poorer this unit is in functional and semantic terms.