The evolution of the Mawes Aas’e (Omotic-Mao) pronouns: evidence for Omotic Lineage

This study examines how Turkish overt and null singular subject pronouns are used in fiction novels. These pronouns are analysed focusing on their antecedents using the framework of Mira Ariel’s Accessibility Theory. A self-compiled corpus was created which contains 300 sentences taken from 12 novels written in Turkish. The antecedents and the overt and null forms of the singular subject pronouns are coded for the dimensions of recency, givenness, and syntactic prominence. The data collected were analysed using the Mann-Whitney U and the Chi-square tests. The findings indicate that the dimensions of recency, givenness, and syntactic prominence have different effects on the utilization of these singular pronouns. For instance, the use of the overt and null 3rd person pronouns is influenced by both recency and syntactic prominence. It is found that the givenness dimension affects the 1st person pronouns but not the 2nd or 3rd person pronouns. Both forms of the 2nd person pronouns are not controlled by these dimensions. The findings of the study suggest that not all personal pronouns are the same concerning the effects of discourse. It is also seen that of three singular person pronouns the one which is more open to such effects is the 3rd person pronouns in Turkish. These findings clearly confirms that the dimensions of recency, givenness, and syntactic prominence are subject to cross-linguistics variance which should be taken into consideration while studying discourse coherence through pronouns.

This paper provides support for the claim that there are two functional projections in full noun phrases, Determiner Phrase (DP) and Number Phrase (NumP), based on an analysis of the dual marker in Modern Hebrew. The assumption of two nominal functional categories permits a structural account of differences in the distribution of elements that function as first/second person pronouns and those that function as third person pronouns. It is hypothesized that 1st/2nd person pronouns are DPs which contain only the head D and that this head is specified for person, number and gender. In contrast, 3rd person pronouns have a more complex structure, where D is specified for person and Num is specified for number and gender. Similarities between past tense agreement and 1st/2nd person pronouns on the one hand and between present tense agreement and 3rd person pronouns on the other suggest that the same nominal functional categories that act as pronouns also act as agreement. In other words, the difference between pronouns and agreement lies not in their category, but in their role in the syntax. Finally, this view of pronouns and agreement is applied to complex null subject phenomena in Modern Hebrew. In order to account for the fact that the distribution of null subjects varies across persons and across tenses, we propose a matching condition on both the category and content of the null pronoun and agreement.

The article provides evidence from a number of languages that sentences which are structurally identical, and differ only in morphological number, display different binding options: 1st and 2nd person sentences allow instances of pronominal binding (e.g. “I am not thinking of me”) while structurally identical sentences in the 3rd person do not (e.g. “*Hei is not thinking of himi”). Such evidence presents a problem for existing versions of the binding theory. It is argued that the data under discussion can be accounted for in terms of a discourse “avoid ambiguity” factor operating on 3rd person, but not on 1st and 2nd person, pronouns. The article contends that the binding options of 3rd person pronouns are determined by both structural (syntactic) and nonstructural (discourse) factors, while the binding options of 1st and 2nd person pronouns are determined by structural factors alone, and in this sense only the latter represent a pure case of syntactic binding. It therefore follows that attempts at formulating structural (syntactic) constraints on binding should avoid 3rd person pronouns as the picture there is additionally complicated by the operation of a discourse factor (avoid ambiguity) and should deal with binding of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, as only they reflect structural conditions on binding. In reality, however, studies investigating anaphoric binding deal almost exclusively with instances of binding in 3rd person sentences, which may have negatively affected current formulations of locality constraints on binding.

Personal pronouns have been shown to influence cognitive perspective takingduring comprehension. Studies using single sentences found that 3rdperson pronouns facilitate the construction of a mental model from an observer’sperspective, whereas 2nd person pronouns support an actor’sperspective. The direction of the effect for 1st person pronounsseems to depend on the situational context. In the present study, weinvestigated how personal pronouns influence discourse comprehension when peopleread fiction stories and if this has consequences for affective components likeemotion during reading or appreciation of the story. We wanted to find out ifpersonal pronouns affect immersion and arousal, as well as appreciation offiction. In a natural reading paradigm, we measured electrodermal activity andstory immersion, while participants read literary stories with 1stand 3rd person pronouns referring to the protagonist. In addition,participants rated and ranked the stories for appreciation. Our results showthat stories with 1st person pronouns lead to higher immersion. Twofactors—transportation into the story world andmental imagery during reading—in particular showed higherscores for 1st person as compared to 3rd person pronounstories. In contrast, arousal as measured by electrodermal activity seemedtentatively higher for 3rd person pronoun stories. The two measuresof appreciation were not affected by the pronoun manipulation. Our findingsunderscore the importance of perspective for language processing, andadditionally show which aspects of the narrative experience are influenced by achange in perspective.

Our approach is focused on the issue of the “markers” of absence as well as on the expression and materialization of that absence in a corpus of works formed of the following plays: L’Intruse, Les Aveugles, Intérieur by Maurice Maeterlinck.
 The acceptions the concept of “absence” may receive throughout our analysis are parts of the phenomenon of progressive alienation seen, for instance, as separation (stressing the idea of distance and departure), or as solitude, then omission (in the sense of forgetting), and culminating with the inability of perception that anticipates isolation, physical imprisonment and announces death (designated through a privative prefix) as an absence that is always present and obscurity.
 We attempt to reveal the “markers” of absence on the level of certain constituents of the play: the character, formed of a discursive feature, infinitely simple and repetitive, much more diminished and developing without individuality, like a silent, mysterious ghost; and the action where it is rather inaction that represents our primary direction of research. As a secondary direction, we consider the markers of absence in a language that, in the case of Maeterlinck, is remarkably pure and lacks any syntactic or lexical complication, from lexical structures (the reassessment of short expressions makes the utterances seem captivatingly strange, revealing, beyond words, unutterable, unspeakable) and the grammar, especially the semantics of its forms – the 3rd person pronouns, a form we may consider as deprived of referential content, the indefinite pronouns which indicate absence –, the semantics of punctuation, especially that of the suspension points.

On current models of the language faculty, the language system is taken to be divided by an interface with systems of thought. However, thought of the type expressed in language is difficult to access in language-independent terms. Potential inter-dependence of the two systems can be addressed by considering language under conditions of pathological changes in the neurotypical thought process. Speech patterns seen in patients with schizophrenia and formal thought disorder (FTD) present an opportunity to do this. Here we reanalyzed a corpus of severely thought-disordered speech with a view to capture patterns of linguistic disintegration comparatively across hierarchical layers of linguistic organization: 1. Referential anomalies, subcategorized into NP type involved, 2. Argument structure, 3. Lexis, and 4. Morphosyntax. Results showed significantly higher error proportions in referential anomalies against all other domains. Morphosyntax and lexis were comparatively least affected, while argument structure was intermediate. No differential impairment was seen in definite vs. indefinite NPs, or 3rd Person pronouns vs. lexical NPs. Statistically significant differences in error proportions emerged within the domain of pronominals, where covert pronouns were more affected than overt pronouns, and 3rd Person pronouns more than 1st and 2nd Person ones. Moreover, copular clauses were more often anomalous than non-copular ones. These results provide evidence of how language and thought disintegrate together in FTD, with language disintegrating along hierarchical layers of linguistic organization and affecting specific construction types. A relative intactness of language at a procedural, morphosyntactic surface level masks a profound impairment in the referential functioning of language.

The study examines the functional potential of impersonal pronouns in different languages. The aim of this study is to analyze personal/impersonal and subject/null subject phenomena in multi-structural languages. The novelty of the study is to establish the role of the pronoun in personal and impersonal aspects. To achieve the aim of the study, the following methods are used: lexico-grammatical analysis, structural analysis, contrast analysis, and interpretative analysis of artistic and lexicographic texts. The comparative research was based on Russian, English, German, and French lexicographic resources and examples from artistic discourse in Russian, English, German, and French with their translations. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the impersonal pronoun is a homonym for the personal pronoun of the 3rd person unit. In grammatical studies, the impersonal pronoun stands out as an independent category. A unit known in grammar as the 3rd person pronoun (in German es, in English it, in French il, ce) has a broader functional potential than other pronouns. Namely, it can act in the text not only as a substitute for another word but can also indicate syntactic structures of different complexity: from a word to a complex of propositions. The prospect is to study the discursive nature of impersonality in various types of discourse in different linguocultures.

Young French children freely produce subject pronouns by the age of 2. However, by age 2 and a half they fail to interpret 3rd person pronouns in an experimental setting designed to select a referent among three participants (speaker, hearer, and other). No such problems are found with 1st and 2nd person pronouns. We formalize our analysis of these empirical results in terms of direction-sensitive optimizations, showing that uni-directionality of optimization, when combined with non-adult-like constraint rankings, explains the general acquisition pattern of 3rd person pronouns. Building on a specific analysis of assigning 3rd person reference by computing over alternatives (Heim 1991), we show that adult interpretation does not require bidirectional OT although it is fully compatible with it. What matters for comprehension in the domain investigated here is constraint ranking.

Findings for concluding remarks in the area of personal pronouns are very limited, especially related to children with specific language impairment (SLI). The goal of the present research was to explain and justify pattern change in personal pronoun usage among children with specific language impairments. For this, one child with specific language impairment from Child Language Data Exchange System/CHILDES was taken. Computerized language analysis (CLAN) v.30 for Windows was employed to analyze the non-elicited spontaneous speech of the child with SLI.  Major studies have been reviewed and some patterns drawn (that is, in terms of The Syntax-Morpholgy Development Chart of Gard et al., 1993). Early attachment and non-elicited spontaneous speech (conversation) with primary caregivers have a very direct impact for personal pronoun production, which can be a cruise for morphosyntax development. The case of “it” with other 3rd person pronoun (“he/she”) production was clearly stated as a voyage for early treatment to children with SLI.  Finally, the present research is a case study (longitudinal) and because of limited sample size, long insighting researchable hypothesis (theoretical and clinical) was drawn, so that future researchers can have a look at it.               Key words: Specific language impairment, personal pronouns, CHILDS, child language development

Dechaine and Wiltschko (2002) argue that, in English, 1st and 2nd person pronouns belong to a different syntactic category than 3rd person pronouns. One of their main arguments is the claim that English 1st and 2nd person pronouns cannot be used as bound variables, unlike 3rd person pronouns. In this squib, I discuss data showing that English 1st and 2nd person pronouns actually do allow bound variable interpretations

Readers select a comprehension mode independent of pronoun: Evidence from fMRI during narrative comprehension

Two types of the 3rd person feature in English?!

Tripartite nominal sentences in Biblical Hebrew refer to those verbless nominal sentences that include a third constituent (usually a 3rd person pronoun or a demonstrative) in addition to a subject and a predicate. In the realm of Biblical Hebrew linguistics, the past 100 years have seen constant research on nominal sentences, and especially there are still differences among views of tripartite nominal sentences. At the center of the controversy lies the question of what the identity and roles of the third element other than the subject and the predicate, that is to say the third person pronoun or the demonstrative (let’s call this third element special pronoun) are in tripartite nominal sentences. <BR> The first task of this study is to explicate whether the special pronoun in tripartite nominal sentences is a copula, and the second is to investigate what its identity and roles are if it is not a copula.<BR> In order to grasp the identity and role of tripartite nominal sentences in Biblical Hebrew, this study attempts at systematic and critical research on the basis of precise and diverse statistical data (our data was based on 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles). The results clarified that the special pronoun in tripartite nominal sentences cannot be a copula. This is because tripartite nominal sentences cannot be regarded as having the same properties as bipartite nominal sentences as the two are too different in many respects. It is also confirmed, as a result of this study, that views that regard the structure of tripartite nominal sentences as extraposition or ‘casus pendens

Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, učaščijsja/učaščajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb učit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames inflect like adjectives and they, too, inflect for gender: Mr. Puškin, Čexov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Puškina, Čexova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ‘patient, pupil’ are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an inflection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ‘classificatory’ property of nouns. The paper discusses the peculiar nature of this type of inflectional marking and provides an explicit analysis of the construction. On the semantic side, nouns such as bol′noj, učaščijsja have a similar representation to that of a phrase person who is sick/studies and we effectively have an instance of the poorly researched phenomenon of de-phrasal word formation. On the morphosyntactic side, the lexical entry of the deadjectival noun or surname shares crucial properties with 3rd person pronouns. The analysis raises questions about the nature of lexical categories (especially ‘mixed categories’) and the structure of lexical entries generally.

Based on a dialogic theoretical framework, this chapter explores the influence of speech genres and activities on the use of referring expressions. The study examines a corpus of 25 dialogues of French speaking children aged between 1;10 and 2;04 in various activities. Results show that referring expressions are not homogenously used throughout activities and genres. Everyday activities increase the use of nouns and strong demonstrative pronouns, games with toys positively affect the use of strong demonstrative pronouns and iconic material entails a more frequent use of clitic demonstratives and to a lesser extent of 3rd person pronouns. However, discourse in activities is made of various speech genres which strongly affect the use of clitic pronouns. Clitic demonstratives are preferred for labeling and evaluation but 3rd person pronouns are used for description and narratives. The discussion deals with the way these associations could be factors accounting for children’s early choice of referring expressions.