the week of december 10

a discussion on pronouns

We took up a very different topic this week: pronouns. We started out by reflecting on what kind of syntactic/morphological objects pronouns are. Are pronouns unanalyzable lexical items? Or are they represented as feature structures that pair features like [number], [person], [gender] with appropriate values like [singular], [2nd], or [feminine]? Or are they just sets of feature values? And are feature values privative like [singular] and [feminine], or are they binary like [+singular] and [-singular]? The hypothesis that we decided to try out in the end was that pronouns are sets of privative features, and it is the semantics of those features that tells us with feature combinations correspond to possible pronouns. An even more ambitious project would try to derive the behavior of all kinds of pronouns, including the many types of referential pronouns and the many types of bound variable pronouns, from the semantics of pronominal features and general semantic, syntactic, and morphophonological principles.