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This chapter explores pragmatic distinctions between personal pronouns such as ‘it’ and demonstrative pronouns such as ‘that’ in English. These two categories of pronoun are typically employed in contexts that vary based on how attentionally prominent the pronoun's referent is; however, many authors have observed that they are occasionally used by speakers in contexts where the other pronoun would have been predicted. This chapter analyzes such cases using data from two studies, and concludes that the attentional salience is only one of a set of factors that comes into play when a speaker chooses which pronominal form to employ. Conceptual structures used by the addressee in interpretation can override the normal implication of salience signaled by the pronoun's category.

This introductory chapter establishes a distinction between two kinds of pronouns, called ‘personal pronouns’ and ‘proforms’, and points out why it has not been possible so far to give a satisfactory definition of the category called ‘pronouns’. It also points out the need to differentiate between free-pronoun and bound-pronoun languages. The primary function of personal pronouns is carried out by free pronouns in the former case, and by bound pronouns (clitics or affixes) in the latter.

This chapter discusses a conflict in the relationship between personal pronouns and their referents. In order to denote speech roles efficiently and to function as shifters, they need to be dissociated from their referents. However, the fact that they do have referents in any given use makes this dissociation less than perfect. The chapter points out how this conflict gives rise to different kinds of compromises in the association of personal pronouns with definiteness, gender, number, modifiers, and complements in different languages.

This chapter addresses a variety of relatively complicated issues in the typology of pronouns. The first of these is the problem within the boundaries of the notion ‘pronoun’. Section 4.2 discusses those linguistic devices that cannot be considered canonical personal pronouns but function in a very similar way in certain languages. Three types of devices, probably the most salient ones cross-linguistically, include demonstratives, classifiers, and social status nouns. Some languages use such devices along with personal pronouns, while other languages use them instead of pronouns. Another problem associated with pronouns is that some overt reduced referential devices simultaneously evoke two referents. Section 4.3 discusses such double reference pronouns while Section 4.4 is devoted to the relatively widespread phenomenon: compounding of the referential function with the marking of clausal categories, such as tense or mode. The question is addressed of whether such forms can be reasonably considered pronouns, and the distinction between free and bound pronouns is recast in the light of this discussion. Finally, Section 4.5 treats the marked kind of pronouns — the so-called strong pronouns. The character of strong pronouns is considered in relation to languages' preference for certain types of reduced referential devices. The cross-linguistic range of discourse contexts in which strong pronouns occur is also discussed.

There are no social class differences in the use of the definite and indefinite articles, but they are used significantly more frequently by males. The articles are used much less frequently by the adolescents. The adolescents, however, use personal pronouns significantly more often than the adults. Females use pronouns much more frequently than males, particularly the pronoun she. The middle-class speakers use WH-relative pronouns much more frequently than the working-class speakers. Females also have a much higher frequency of reference to named persons, while males are more likely to name places.

The logical character of I is obligatorily deictic. Some variant devices have obligatory anaphoric reference, some are free, and some again have obligatory deictic reference. It is by singling out individuals made salient in the extra-sentential context that uses of this third sort refer. Substitution instances reveal and matching constraints confirm that each use of I (together with singular You) must fall into this third category.

This chapter points out certain characteristics that differentiate between first and second person pronouns. These characteristics derive from the prominence of the speaker (as in making statements or giving orders) or of the addressee (as in asking questions). These and certain other characteristics that derive from the association of personal pronouns with their referents appear to conflict with their other characteristics.

The two-and-a-half lectures on the personal forms of the verb begin with some general remarks on the history of the subject,on the forms of the verb attested, and on the use of the personal pronouns. Uses of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons, singular and plural, are discussed and illustrated. The end of Lecture 20 and the start of 21 are devoted to impersonal verbs (especially but not only weather verbs).

Personal pronouns and proper names are inherently grounded. The structure of other nominals tends to reflect semantic function, with the head noun as core, grounding as the outermost layer, and modifiers in between. Noun modification is varied both semantically and in its structural implementation. When nominal and relational expressions combine grammatically, there is often a discrepancy between the nominal expression's profile and the entity which participates most directly in the relationship—its active zone with respect to that relationship. Noun classes have varying degrees of semantic motivation. Distributional classes, defined by participation in particular patterns, may be semantically arbitrary. While gender-type classes have semantic prototypes, the class as a whole is defined by a consistent set of grammatical behaviors. In a usage based approach, such classes are characterized by families of constructional schemas. Noun classifiers likewise have prototypical values semantically extended to a range of other cases. They represent a distinct kind of nominal structure in which the classifier functions as a schematic head noun. Classifiers are related to quantifier constructions allowing the unitization of a mass. Nouns bear various kinds of grammatical markings. Most intrinsic to nouns are elements deriving them from other classes. There is no sharp distinction between such derivation and noun inflection. Markings of gender and number are intermediate. More extrinsic are markings indicating a nominal's role in higher-level grammatical constructions. These are meaningful in a symbolic account of grammar. Such an account accommodates both agreement—the multiple realization of semantic specifications—and cases where multiple specifications are realized by a single, unanalyzable form. Analyzability is a matter of degree.

The present chapter focuses mostly on personal pronouns in Transeurasian languages. A brief introduction describes the main typological similarities and differences among the pronominal systems of all branches. The main part gives a summary of the declension of personal pronouns in the five branches. The overview is based on sets of tables with declensions of Turkic (separately for subgroups), Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese branches. Further tables reconstruct pronominal declensions for the daughter protolanguages and the final result is an attempt to reconstruct and comment on the Transeurasian protosystem. The third part gives an overview of other types of pronouns, mainly demonstratives, possessive and reflexive forms, interrogatives with related indefinite and negative forms. At the end of the chapter, internal loanwords and elements borrowed from other than Transeurasian languages are mentioned.

I has the logical character, inferential role, referential function, expressive use, and communicative role of a deictic term. Uses of I share the referential security and identificatory ease of certain uses of other deictic terms. I has a distinct character within the group due to kind salience, expressive demonstration, communicative demonstration, and certain other features. These findings show that the whole standard account of indexicals and demonstratives, due to Kaplan, rests on two false principles and must be replaced. More positively, these findings offer new ways to explore first-personal thinking and self-knowledge, together with broader questions dependent on them such as practical reasoning, belief-acquisition, and belief-ascription.

Choosing an appropriate self‐reference term from the many possibilities offered by the language is a social competence expected of Japanese speakers, and a way to display their understanding of their social role at a given moment in a given context. Using Silverstein's model of nested indexical orders as an analytical tool, this chapter examines first‐ and second‐generation Japanese Americans' borrowing of the English first person self‐reference term me in their Japanese discourse – something strictly illegitimazed in Japan. Analyzing naturally occurring language use of immigrant communities, this chapter argues that this borrowing is an example of an emergent – and ongoingly transformative – entextualization of possible new community norms. In particular, by examining how the culturally transgressive use of me becomes an increasingly community validated norm when transplanted in American soil, the findings of this chapter make visible the contingent efficacy of a community's validation (or non‐validation) of new forms of language use.

This chapter undertakes a treatment of the rhetoric of personal pronouns in Ginzburg's writings on love and sexuality, drawing on Michael Lucey's study of the first person in twentieth-century French literature about love. It brings together questions of genre and narrative, on the one hand, and gender and sexuality, on the other. The chapter is divided into two sections, treating writings from two different periods on two kinds of love Ginzburg thought typical of intellectuals: in “First Love,” it discusses the unrequited and tragic love depicted in Ginzburg's teenage diaries (1920–23); in “Second Love,” it analyzes the love that is realized but in the end equally tragic, depicted in drafts related to Home and the World (1930s). The chapter examines the models the author sought in literary, psychological, and philosophical texts (Weininger, Kraft-Ebbing, Blok, Shklovsky, Oleinikov, Hemingway, and Proust).

Proposes a multiple-proposition theory, which explains certain linguistic data in a straightforward way. The data are provided by description-names, i.e. proper names like ‘The Holy Virgin’, ‘The Beatles’, etc. and complex demonstratives, i.e. NPs of the form ‘that table covered in books’, ‘this pen’, ‘these horses’, etc. The multiple-proposition theory proposed fits within the framework of direct reference.

The two-and-a-half lectures on the personal forms of the verb begin with some general remarks on the history of the subject, on the forms of the verb attested,and on the use of the personal pronouns. Uses of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons, singular and plural, are discussed and illustrated. The end of Lecture 20 and the start of 21 are devoted to impersonal verbs (especially but not only weather verbs).

Language evolved for communication, so it has “built in” features that respond to the givens of human discourse. Part III, beginning with this chapter, covers the language choices that acknowledge the immediacy of discourse, beginning with the partners in communication: the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader. The real roles of source and recipient are also constructed by the language of a text, whether or not they are made explicit. Extreme cases of fashioning the mutual roles of speakers and recipients are modeled in the salutations recommended in medieval letter-writing manuals. Typically, the role construction in a text can be made explicit when the personal pronouns creating rhetorical agents and audiences are used: I, you, we. Each of these choices has special uses and there are corresponding genres of fictional address. When there are no explicit references to the speaker and audience, the text may seem impersonal or objective, but speaker/audience roles are still assigned. The goal of discourse can be to change the relationship, or what Goffman called the footing, between the speaker and the addressee, and the constructed footing can in turn serve what Burke called the persuasive identification between the arguer and the audience. In rhetorical manuals, striking methods of speaker/audience construction were noted. The apostrophe involves specifically calling on or hailing an addressee. Arguers can also partition their audiences, dividing them into subgroups and making the whole group aware of its differences. They can also speak frankly to one subgroup in the presence of another, or even try to purge the audience and purify the remainder. Finally, arguers can ask questions in a variety of ways that turn audiences into cooperative responders.

I fulfils its communicative role in the deictic mode. It is the communicative role of any singular term to communicate thoughts. This requires that the audience know the positive answer to the question: ‘which individual is being spoken of?’, that is, the term must achieve discriminability of reference for the audience. Deictic terms require salience if they are to achieve discriminability of reference for the audience, i.e., it is as the individual made salient that one must identify the referent of a use of a deictic term. It is as the individual made salient that one must identify the referent of a use of I.

Most European languages display politeness distinctions in personal pronouns similar to the one between the second‐person singular address pronouns tu (2SG) and vous (2SG.HON) in French. The goal of this chapter is to present a functional analysis of the emergence and diffusion of politeness distinctions in personal pronouns in terms of a competing motivations approach. First, the relevant functional motivations for this historical process will be identified in a criteria‐bound way. Second, it will be shown that the social or pragmatic functions—politeness (Brown and Levinson) and prestige—are in conflict with the cognitive/psychological factor of economy. It will be argued that the different degrees of grammatical integration of the polite pronouns into the pronominal paradigm of the respective languages may be explained by this conflict, not in terms of a winning and a losing factor but in terms of a compromise between the factors involved.

This chapter turns to object agreement with personal pronouns in Hungarian. Pronouns are interesting because they do not always trigger agreement with the verb: first person objects never trigger object agreement (morphology), and second person pronouns only do with first person singular subjects. It is proposed that the distribution of object agreement is a morphological effect and argues that all personal pronouns do in fact trigger agreement, but agreement is not always spelled out. This means that Hungarian has an inverse agreement system, where the spell-out of agreement is determined by the relative person feature (or person feature sets) of the subject and the object. A formally explicit analysis of the syntax and the morphological spell-out of agreement is provided.