Personal Pronoun

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Subgroup of pronouns which refer to persons, either speakers (I, we), addressees (you) or other persons/things (he, she, it) ( inclusive vs exclusive). Three types of personal pronouns can be distinguished according to use: (a) anaphoric pronouns (=the antecedent precedes the pronoun): Philip is looking for his knife, which he desperately needs; (b) cataphoric pronouns (the antecedent follows the pronoun): Before she said anything, Caroline thought about it a long time; and (c) exophoric pronouns (the antecedent stands outside of the sentence): Caroline is glad that he is coming. The use of pronouns is subject to certain language-specific restrictions. Nevertheless, one general tendency is that pronouns cannot be used in the same clause as the antecedent they refer to; in such situations, reflexive pronouns are used (e.g. Philip₁ brushed *him₁/himself₁ off). In addition, personal pronouns (just as all pronouns in general) tend to follow their antecedents ( anaphora). so that cataphoric pronouns occur more rarely and are subject to greater restrictions than anaphoric pronouns. In older forms of transformational grammar, personal pronouns are derived from pronominalizing transformations which replace a noun phrase by a pronoun if both elements have identical reference. In more recent forms of transformational grammar personal pronouns are not handled by transformations, but rather by binding theory.

Bach, E. 1970. Problominalization. LingI 1. 121 ff.

Ingram, D. 1978. Typology and universals of personal pronouns. In J.H.Greenberg et al. (eds), Universals of human language. Stanford, CA. 213–47.

Jackendoff, R.S. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA.

Kreimann, J. and A.E.Ojeda (eds) 1980. Papers from the parasession on pronouns and anaphora of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, IL.

Langacker, R. 1966. On pronominalization and the chain of command.

Repr. in D.A.Reibel and S.A. Schane (eds), Modern studies in English: readings in transformational grammar. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969. 160–87.

Lasnik, H. 1976. Remarks on coreference. LingA 2. 1–22.

Partee, B.H. 1970. Opacity, reference and pronouns. Synthese 21. 359–85.

Postal, P.M. 1971. Cross-over phenomena: a study in the grammar of coreference. New York.

——1972. A global constraint on pronominalization. LingI 3. 35–60.

Ross, J.R. 1967. On the cyclic nature of English pronominalization. Repr. in D.A.Reibel and S.A. Schane (eds), Modern studies in English: readings in transformational grammar. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969. 187–200.

anaphora, binding theory, reflexive pronoun

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