{"id":1856,"date":"2009-11-03T13:13:04","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T17:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1856"},"modified":"2009-11-03T13:21:32","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T17:21:32","slug":"pronouns-n-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1856","title":{"rendered":"Pronouns 'n' stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

The comments on Geoff Pullum's recent \"grammar gravy train\" posting<\/a> have wandered into the confused territory where the grammatical terms pronoun<\/em>, possessive<\/em> (or genitive<\/em>), and determiner<\/em> live. (The first two have a long history,\u00a0going back to the grammatical traditions for Latin and Greek. The third is much more recent; OED<\/em>2 takes it back only to Bloomfield's Language<\/em> in 1933.)\u00a0We've been over this territory on Language Log several times, from several different angles. But here's one more attempt at clearing things up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First, pronouns. Simplifying things somewhat, the grammatical tradition says two things about them. One, they constitute a part of speech (one of a small number of these, including Noun as a separate part of speech from Pronoun). Two, a pronoun \"stands for\", or more precisely, \"takes the place of\", a noun (that is, the function of pronouns is to avoid repeating nouns); people, among them \"Back of beyond\" in a comment on Geoff's posting, sometimes say that this claim follows directly from the etymology of the word pronoun<\/em> (though I have cautioned many times that Labels Are Not Definitions; see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Instead of part of speech<\/em>, I prefer the term syntactic category<\/em>, or when the meaning is clear from context, simply category<\/em>; the terminology allows me to talk about phrasal categories as well as lexical categories. But there's no substantive issue here; it's simply a matter of terminological taste.<\/p>\n

There is, however, a set of questions about the lexical categories of English. The lexical categories of English in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language<\/em> are not quite the same as those of traditional grammar; CGEL has a nontraditional category Determinative (with members traditionally classed as a subtype of Adjective) and doesn't treat Noun and Pronoun as separate categories. I say \"doesn't (exactly)\" treat them as separate categories, because CGEL<\/em> does treat pronouns as a subtype of the Noun category, and indeed distinguishes subtypes of pronouns, among them the (definite) \"personal pronouns\" that were the focus of the comments on Geoff's posting on pronouns.<\/p>\n

As I say here every so often, the world of lexical categories is complex. In particular, no matter which ones you take as in some sense \"basic\", you'll have to recognize many subtypes, and supertypes as well (for instance a supertype A embracing both Adjective and Adverb). It's not even clear to me that the choice of one set of basic categories rather than another can be justified on empirical grounds — so there might not be a substantive issue here, either.<\/p>\n

As for pronouns taking the place of nouns, here I think traditional grammar conceptualizes things very badly. Again, I've noted here every so often that the way to think of anaphors is not as pointing to linguistic expressions (whether words or larger expressions), but as pointing to referents. The latest revision of the OED <\/em>(September 2009) glosses pronoun<\/em> this way:<\/p>\n

A word that can function as a noun phrase when used by itself and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g.\u00a0I<\/em>,\u00a0you<\/em>) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g.\u00a0she<\/em>,\u00a0it<\/em>,\u00a0this<\/em>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This definition doesn't cover all types of pronouns; it doesn't work well for indefinite pronouns (someone<\/em>, everybody<\/em>, etc.) or interrogative pronouns (who<\/em>, what<\/em>, etc.), for instance, but for definite personal pronouns it does about as well as you can in a short space. It's couched in terms of referents, not linguistic expressions, and there's no talk of replacing repeated nouns. And it classifies pronouns as words (with a characteristic semantics\/pragmatics) that can constitute a NP on their own.<\/p>\n

On to possessives (or genitives). Geoff notes that he doesn't distinguish these two terms, though he has a personal preference for genitive<\/em> to refer to inflected NPs, as in\u00a0Kim's<\/em> \/\u00a0their picture<\/em>, while I prefer possessive<\/em>. (Some writers prefer to reserve possessive<\/em> for the syntactic construction with of<\/em>, as in a picture of Kim \/ them<\/em>.) This is a matter of terminological taste, not substance.<\/p>\n

What, then, is the category of possessive expressions? Many writers answer Adjective (and use that answer to argue, invalidly, that possessives can't be antecedents for pronouns; there's extended discussion of the Possessive Antecedent Proscription here<\/a>, with criticism of the Adjective answer, and there are links to Language Log discussions here<\/a>). Others give a more sophisticated answer, Determiner (or in \"Back of beyond\"'s variant, Article), but I've observed a number of times here that this is not quite right, because though possessive-marked NPs can serve in a Determiner function<\/strong>, as far as syntactic category<\/strong> goes, they're NPs.<\/p>\n

CGEL<\/em> is careful to distinguish category from function — not at all a new distinction with this work, but one that's somewhat tricky in the case of non-canonical Determiners like possessives and the nominal determiner a lot<\/em> (of<\/em>). English does have a lexical category of words whose primary function is as determiners (the articles a<\/em> and the<\/em>, the demonstratives this<\/em> and that<\/em>, some quantity modifiers, like some<\/em> and every<\/em>); this is the category CGEL<\/em> labels Determinative.<\/p>\n

Putting all this together: the my<\/em> of my book<\/em> is the possessive form of the 1st-person personal pronoun; pronouns are, among other things, words (with characteristic semantics\/pragmatics) that can constitute a NP on their own; and possessive NPs can serve in the Determiner function (with the syntax associated with that function).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The comments on Geoff Pullum's recent \"grammar gravy train\" posting have wandered into the confused territory where the grammatical terms pronoun, possessive (or genitive), and determiner live. (The first two have a long history,\u00a0going back to the grammatical traditions for Latin and Greek. The third is much more recent; OED2 takes it back only to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-syntax"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}