Pronoun Paradigm Research Articles

What women want: Teaching and learning pronouns in Ngarrindjeri

ABSTRACT Ngarrindjeri is one of many Aboriginal languages being actively revived in southern Australia. Women in the Ngarrindjeri community have expressed a desire to speak, read and write their language with the same richness as when it was spoken fluently over 70 years ago. Like many Aboriginal languages, Ngarrindjeri has a rich selection of free and bound pronouns, which express person, number and case, but unlike most other Australian languages, it has a third set of reduced free form pronouns. This tripartite set is used to express discourse saliency and continuing topic, and to definitize noun phrases. This paper addresses the issue of teaching and learning how to use Ngarrindjeri pronouns in traditional ways, but for contemporary purposes. Learning Ngarrindjeri requires understanding grammatical categories such as case that differ substantially from English, plus understanding the use of free forms for discourse saliency, bound forms for continuing topics, and free reduced forms where English uses articles. Finally, it requires memorizing a large number of pronoun forms. We share anecdotes on learning pronouns from individual authors, and a reflection from a young Ngarrindjeri woman. We then propose strategies and resources to make it easier to learn, remember and use the complex, regularized pronoun paradigms of Ngarrindjeri.

Synchronic variation in Sri Lanka Portuguese personal pronouns

Abstract This paper presents and discusses the instances of synchronic variation attested in the personal pronoun paradigm of modern Sri Lanka Portuguese, an endangered Portuguese-based creole spoken by relatively small communities scattered across Eastern and Northern Sri Lanka. Although Sri Lanka Portuguese has a long history of documentation dating from, at least, the beginning of the 19th century, only a few studies have explicitly reported cases of synchronic variation. This study aims, therefore, to fill that gap, by contributing to the description and explanation of patterns of variation relating to the personal pronoun paradigm as encountered in documentary data collected between 2015 and 2020, over several field trips to the districts of Ampara, Batticaloa, Jaffna, and Trincomalee. The nature of the variation observed in the data ranges from phonetic alternations to strategies of paradigm regularization and stylistic shrinkage, often revealing the effects of diachronic processes of variant competition and substitution. Combining the observed patterns of variation with surveyed linguistic trends of language shift, we propose that obsolescence may be responsible for some of the variability encountered in modern SLP personal pronouns, especially that associated with certain socially- or geographically-defined subsets of the speech community (viz. the younger generations and the speakers from Jaffna) characterized by advanced language loss.

Licensing of nominal ellipsis in Hungarian possessives

We argue, based on novel data, that the possessor head (Poss) can license ellipsis of its complement in Hungarian. That is, contra existing claims in the literature, possessor morphology can survive nominal ellipsis and be stranded on the remnant. Adopting Saab & Lipták (2016)’s of ellipsis licensing, we propose that there is variation in the size of the ellipsis site in Hungarian: nominal ellipsis can be licensed by either Num or Poss. We further propose that nominal ellipsis licensed by Poss can capture a previously unanalyzed variation in the Hungarian possessive pronoun paradigm. Specifically, the two variants of possessive pronouns correspond to two different structures: one is the anaphoric possessive (see Dékány 2015), while the other exists only as a consequence of nominal ellipsis, which, as we show, is a productive possibility.

Los pronombres personales en wayunaiki

Este artículo presenta una descripción de las regularidades morfosintácticas subyacentes al sistema pronominal del wayunaiki (Arawak (Septentrional): Colombia), teniendo en cuenta los roles gramaticales de los pronombres. El análisis parte de un corpus recogido recientemente en diversos trabajos de campo. Se proponen tres paradigmas de marcas de persona: el primero consiste en 8 formas pronominales (morfemas libres) que varían en cuanto a persona (1ª, 2ª y 3ª), número (singular/plural), y en la 3ª en cuanto a género (masculino/femenino), y que se emplean para expresar el sujeto y el objeto directo, siendo principalmente la morfología verbal el factor que permite la interpretación de una de estas dos funciones gramaticales. El segundo paradigma está constituído por pronombres ligados que se prefijan 1. a nombres, en cuyo caso se expresa una relación de posesión (poseedor), y 2. a preposiciones que remiten al dativo y a diversos roles oblicuos. El tercer paradigma consiste en un conjunto de marcas de persona con función de sujeto que se prefijan al verbo transitivo. También se describe el sistema de marcas verbales que concuerdan con el sujeto en construcciones intransitivas.

Person and deixis in Heiltsuk pronouns

AbstractHarbour (2016) argues for a parsimonious universal set of features for grammatical person distinctions, and suggests (ch. 7) that the same features may also form the basis for systems of deixis. We apply this proposal to an analysis of Heiltsuk, a Wakashan language with a particularly rich set of person-based deictic contrasts (Rath 1981). Heiltsuk demonstratives and third-person pronominal enclitics distinguish proximal-to-speaker, proximal-to-addressee, and distal (in addition to an orthogonal visibility contrast). There are no forms marking proximity to third persons (e.g., ‘near them’) or identifying the location of discourse participants (e.g., ‘you near me’ vs. ‘you over there’), nor does the deictic system make use of the clusivity contrast that appears in the pronoun paradigm (e.g., ‘this near you and me’ vs. ‘this near me and others’). We account for the pattern by implementing Harbour's spatial element χ as a function that yields proximity to its first- or second-person argument.

"Nós concordamos em pessoa e número, porém, nós discorda bastante." Um estudo dos pronomes de primeira pessoa plural em PB com base em um corpus de fala popular

No Português Brasileiro (PB), as tradicionalmente chamadas “formas nominativas” dos pronomes são também representantes oblíquos, sem nenhuma marginalidade em sua aceitação, não havendo uma correspondência unívoca entre uma forma pronominal e uma única função casual/gramatical, como esperado para o Português Europeu (PE). Argumentamos que os pronomes de primeira pessoa plural "nós" e "a gente" integram o sistema vernacular de pronomes do PB e não concorrem entre si. Embasados nos pressupostos da teoria da Gramática Gerativa, partimos da hipótese de que o reflexo da mudança gramatical do PB, relacionada à oposição de um sistema composto por 6 (seis) pessoas gramaticais em direção a uma oposição dual (primeira/terceira pessoa singular), tem como consequência uma mudança nos traços gramaticais dos pronomes que deixam de ser marcados como nominativo no léxico, sendo o paradigma de pronomes do vernáculo brasileiro caracterizado por um paradigma flexional e um sistema de concordância distinto do PE.

Faetar null subjects: a variationist study of a heritage language in contact

Abstract Faetar is an under-documented variety descended from Francoprovençal and spoken in two isolated Apulian villages in southern Italy as well as in the emigrant diaspora, especially in the Greater Toronto Area. Speakers use two series of subject pronouns (strong and weak pronouns), producing sentences with zero, one or two overt subject pronouns. The status of the overt forms as subject pronouns, emphatic pronouns, left- or right-dislocated pronouns, clitics, or affixes is not clear. Contrary to the predictions of the Null Subject Parameter hypothesis (Perlmutter 1971, Deep and surface structure constraints in syntax. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston; Chomsky 1981, Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris), these grammars have subject pronoun paradigms that are variable and conditioned by a number of linguistic factors (including person, tense, information status and subject type). This article delineates which aspects vary diachronically, spatially, or between individuals – a necessary prerequisite to constructing a theoretical model that accounts for this variation. By comparing the patterns of use in France, Italy, and Toronto, and using sources that span nearly a century, we see that despite the very small size of its speech community, Faetar shows little sign of accommodating to English’s virtually categorical presence of subject pronouns, nor to Italian’s high null subject (hereafter Ø-subject) rate, nor to the conditioning effects found in those languages.

Personal Pronoun Morphology

The structure of personal pronouns in Beng was thoroughly described in (Paperno 2005). Here we reproduce pronoun paradigms with minimal comments on the usage of pronoun series. Table 3. Paradigms of personal pronouns Series Singular Plural Predicative marker with a singular subject NP 1 2 3 1 2 3 non-subject ŋ mi a aŋ ka ŋo possessive mɔ mipɔ apɔ aŋpɔ // amɔ kapɔ ŋopɔ reflexive ŋ dra mi dra a dra aŋ dra ka dra ŋo dra focus (independent) maŋ m...

Pronominal case and verbal finiteness contingencies in child English

ABSTRACTChild English speakers use nonnominative pronouns in subject position but do not tend to use these types of pronouns with finite verbs. Recent findings demonstrate that knowledge of the pronoun paradigm is relevant to pronoun case errors below the 60% correct finiteness marking level but irrelevant above it. We use a receptive test with children who are above the 60% correct finiteness marking level and show that judgments of nominative case and verb finiteness correlate (r= .549,p< .001,n= 49), consistent with the predictions of case theory. Children at this level of finiteness marking show no asymmetry in feminine versus masculine nonnominative errors, but they do allow third singular–swith nonnominatives, which is problematic for both agreement tense omission model and constructivist priming accounts.

Remixing a mixed language: The emergence of a new pronominal system in Chabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish)

In bilingual contact environments, personal pronoun systems are relatively impervious to replacement or borrowing. Several Creole languages contain hybrid personal pronoun paradigms, but the language contact environments that resulted in creolization and mixed pronominal systems are no longer in effect, and the mechanisms of pronominal replacement remain unknown. The present analysis is based on data from Zamboangueño Chabacano, a variety of Philippine Creole Spanish that has already undergone at least one set of pronominal replacements in its history, substituting Spanish-derived plural pronouns with pronouns taken from Philippine languages. Due to recent migration, Zamboangueño Chabacano is now in contact with Tagalog, and younger speakers are incorporating the Tagalog second-person singular respect-neutral pronoun ikaw into the Chabacano system. The insertion of ikaw restores the respectful–respect-neutral pronominal distinction originally present in Spanish and found in Philippine languages but lacking in Chabacano. The ease with which a Tagalog pronoun is entering Chabacano is attributed to long-standing popular views that Zamboangueño Chabacano is already a mixed-up language—often regarded as “broken Spanish”—devoid of its own grammar and therefore readily susceptible to any and all intrusions. The use of ikaw as an in-group marker among Zamboangueño youth further aids the addition of the Tagalog pronoun to the Chabacano paradigm.

Is Oksapmin Ok?—A Study of the Genetic Relationship between Oksapmin and the Ok Languages

In this paper, evidence is provided that suggests the Oksapmin language, previously classed as constituting an isolate within the larger Trans-New Guinea family, is related to the Mountain Ok branch of the Ok language family and, by extension, the entire Ok family. A list of cognates and sound correspondences is given, as well as evidence from bound morphology and pronoun paradigms.

Article défini, pronoms personnels de 3e personne et démonstratifs : approche comparée de l’accès à la référence

In the study of anaphora, one major issue is that of the access modes provided by full NPs and pronouns. An access mode is understood not as the whole process of anaphor resolution, but as the set of procedural and qualitative information common to all NPs of a given type (for instance, common to all definite descriptions). The present study proposes a comparative approach to those access modes, focusing more specifically on demonstratives, definite descriptions and third-person pronouns. About demonstratives, which can be either pronouns or determiners, it confirms that, as stated in the utterer-centred approach to language, each has a single core value, and therefore encodes a single access mode, whether it is used as a determiner or as a pronoun in context. The study seeks to determine on what grounds a simple demonstrative is preferred over a complex one. The other question raised is whether such pairing between a determiner and a pronoun can also occur with members of the determiner and pronoun paradigms that do not share a form. To that end, the study compares the access modes coded by the definite article and third-person pronouns. It argues that they, too, form a pair.

When children reach beyond their grasp: why some children make pronoun case errors and others don't

This research addresses the question of why some children are disposed to making a large number of pronoun case errors and others are not. The answer proposed is that when pronoun paradigm building outstrips the development of INFL, children become especially vulnerable to erring in the choice of pronominal word form, resulting in pronoun case error. On the other hand, when pronoun paradigm building proceeds more conservatively, the risk of error is reduced. The spontaneous sentence production of children observed in naturalistic caregiver--child interaction from a cross-section of 44 children (2;0-4;0) is used to support this proposal. The data show that pronoun case error was minimal among children who had strong INFL. However, among children with weak INFL there was a wide range of variation, some children making many errors and others making none. Analysis of variance confirmed that this variation was strongly related to the dispersion of production attempts across an extended pronoun paradigm, such that, the fewer cells attempted, the lower the error rate. These findings show that pronoun case errors are not an inevitable result of grammatical development, but may conceivably be avoided altogether if paradigm building proceeds at a rate commensurate with the child's development of INFL.

Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: The case of Italian

In his typological analysis of relative clauses (=RC), Comrie (1989: 149; 2002, 2003) notes that the relative pronoun (=RP) type is widespread in the languages of Europe but is cross-linguistically quite rare. Indeed, he points outs that examples found outside Europe nearly always turn out to have arisen under the influence of some European languages. Thus the relative-pronoun type gives “the impression of a type that arises rarely spontaneously, but which once it has arisen, is a favoured construction for borrowing” (Comrie 2003: 20).

HE and THEY in indefinite anaphora in written present-day English

This article explores the usage of singular HE and plural THEY with their possessive, objective and reflexive forms in anaphoric reference to compound indefinite pronouns in written present-day English. Previous studies have indicated that the most commonly used personal pronouns in anaphoric reference to non-referential indefinite pronouns are indeed HE and THEY. The data for the study are drawn from the written part of the British National Corpus. The structure of the study is such that following the introduction, I will survey the earlier literature on the topic to illustrate that there is a gap in the previous studies on epicene pronouns. The third section defines the indefinite pronouns used in this study. In addition, the section also discusses the differences between the meaning and form of the indefinites and the semantic reference sets of each pronoun paradigm. Following the explanation of the methods, the article sets out the findings.

Person and Number in Pronouns: A Feature-Geometric Analysis

The set of person and number features necessary to characterize the pronominal paradigms of the world's languages is highly constrained, and their interaction is demonstrably systematic. We develop a geometric representation of morphosyntactic features which provides a principled explanation for the observed restrictions on these paradigms. The organization of this geometry represents the grammaticalization of fundamental cognitive categories, such as reference, plurality, and taxonomy. We motivate the geometry through the analysis of pronoun paradigms in a broad range of genetically distinct languages.

Genitive subjects in child English

This chapter provides an analysis of children's so-called ‘genitive subjects’ (like my in My want one ) within the framework of Principles and Parameters Theory . Child clauses with genitive subjects have been argued to have a very different syntactic structure from their adult counterparts, viz. to be nominal rather than clausal, or VPs rather than IPs, or projections of an underspecified (rather than a fully specified) INFL. I argue that the distribution of children's genitive subjects shows conclusively that the structures containing them are clauses rather than nominals. I go on to challenge the traditional analysis of her/my/our/its subjects as genitive pronouns, arguing instead that her subjects are objective, my/its subjects function as strong nominative pronouns for the children who use them, and that our subjects result from a lexical gap in the child's pronoun paradigm. I conclude that there is no evidence that English children go through a genitive subjects stage, and hence no evidence that the grammars developed by two- and three-year old children are radically different from their adult counterparts.

Patterns of pronoun case error.

This paper addresses the question of whether the rate and patterns of pronoun case error are influenced by the composition of an individual pronoun's paradigm. Twenty-nine children, aged 2;6 to 4;0 were audiotaped for two 1-hour sessions, interacting with their primary caregivers engaged in free play, book reading and family album viewing. It was found that her was overextended for she at a significantly higher rate than him for he and them for they, providing evidence of a 'double-cell' effect that increases the incidence of error in the feminine pronoun. It was also found that the overextension of nominative forms (e.g. he for him), were antagonistic to the more frequently occurring type of overextension, objective for nominative (e.g. him for he). These findings indicate that the composition of a pronoun's paradigm influenced the patterns of pronoun case error observed.

The historical development of pronoun paradigms in the Pilbara region of Western Australia

Abstract This paper presents a detailed account of the changes affecting pronoun paradigms in a sample of thirteen languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The reconstruction demonstrates a number of interesting diachronic trends including analogical levelling, the loss and later reintroduction of inclusive/exclusive person categories and the waxing and waning of nominative/ergative case syncretisms. In addition, it appears that many of the changes are the result of pattern diffusion. Taken together, the changes detailed in this study present a rich catalogue of the kinds of changes which can be expected to have occurred in the development of Australian languages more generally.

An English-Hausa Dictionary

students and Hausaphiles now have an English-Hausa dictionary that is readily available, attractively produced and quite attractively priced, and more comprehensive than any English-based dictionary for an African language...A magnificent accomplishment that promises to serve a wide variety of purposes. It establishes both precedent and an excellent model that one hopes will be followed for other less commonly taught -William R. Leben, Modern Language Journal This is a modern comprehensive dictionary designed specifically for English-speaking users who wish to acquire communicative fluency in Hausa, West Africa's most important and most widely spoken language.The dictionary contains a broad selection of words that the average person is likely to need in speaking and writing Hausa for everyday use. Included are common technical terms drawn from a range of fields, as well as generally accepted borrowings from English and French. The entries are divided into meaning groups and grammatical categories, marked clearly by semantic and usage indicators to help the user distinguish between the various meanings. Numerous phrases, sentences, and common idiomatic expressions illustrate conversational usage and provide culturally informative contexts. The easy to read typography marks lexical and grammatical distinctions of tone and vowel length for every Hausa word in the dictionary. The introduction provides concise information on various points of Hausa grammar. Useful appendixes include pronoun paradigms, pronunciation guides to Hausa place names and personal names, an index of Nigerian and international organizations, and a description of the currencies of Nigeria and Niger. An English-Hausa Dictionary will be an invaluable guide for students, research scholars, translators, and people with educational business, or governmental ties in West Africa who are interested in learning the language and culture of one of that area's most dynamic societies. It will be equally useful to non-Hausa speaking Africans who want to learn Hausa. In general, the innovative design features of this book will set a new standard for pedagogically oriented reference works of African languages. A valuable resource for scholars and students of linguistic and African languages and literature...It is highly recommended for use in academic and research libraries. Newman and her editorial staff deserve to be congratulated. -Felix Eme Unaeze, American Reference Books Annual