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The paper "Pronouns in Ranglong" addresses the usage of pronouns in the Ranglong language. It identifies three distinct categories of pronouns: first person, second person, and third person. Structurally, the first and second person pronouns are monosyllabic, while the third person pronouns are bi-syllabic. Ranglong does not distinguish gender in its pronouns. The paper also discusses the morphological characteristics of these pronouns, focusing on their plural forms as well as demonstrative, interrogative, and reflexive pronouns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author shares her reflections about the basic problems with the fight for claiming appropriate pronouns. Topics discussed include the use of the singular pronoun he for a large group of women which included just one man, the fight for using plural pronouns for people who reject the conventional singular pronoun, and the view that the pronoun debate is parochial in the English language.

In responding to customer questions or complaints, should marketing agents linguistically “put the customer first” by using certain personal pronouns? Customer orientation theory, managerial literature, and surveys of managers, customer service representatives, and consumers suggest that firm agents should emphasize how “we” (the firm) serve “you” (the customer), while de-emphasizing “I” (the agent) in these customer–firm interactions. The authors find evidence of this language pattern in use at over 40 firms. However, they theorize and demonstrate that these personal pronoun emphases are often suboptimal. Five studies using lab experiments and field data reveal that firm agents who refer to themselves using “I” rather than “we” pronouns increase customers’ perceptions that the agent feels and acts on their behalf. In turn, these positive perceptions of empathy and agency lead to increased customer satisfaction, purchase intentions, and purchase behavior. Furthermore, the authors find that customer-referencing “you” pronouns have little impact on these outcomes and can sometimes have negative consequences. These findings enhance understanding of how, when, and why language use affects social perception and behavior and provide valuable insights for marketers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the need and proper use of the pronouns we, us, our. All the same, the pronoun has its own semantic peculiarities: its surface is by no means smooth, but marked by fissures which support abundant rhetorical growth. In that sense ‘we', together with its objective and possessive cases, is a keyword despite its nondescript appearance.

This article treats the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA) 3rd person singular pronoun נוולא nawla, attested four times in the vast rabbinic corpus: three times in the Babylonian Talmud and one time in Tractate Sofrim. First, it is shown that the form is epicene, as it can have both masculine and feminine antecedents. Second, the four attestations reveal a specialized meaning for the form, to wit, ‘this-one’ or ‘that-one’ (as opposed to the other one) when there are specifically two items under discussion. Which is to say, the form נוולא nawla is not used for simple ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘this’ or ‘that’, for which JBA and other Aramaic dialects have familiar and widely attested forms. Third, the article proposes that the form is borrowed from the Hurro-Urartian family, well known for its epicene pronouns. See, for example, Hurrian anni=lla, ani=lla, etc., Urartian i=ne=lə, ina=ne=lə, etc. Even though these forms are plural forms, while נוולא nawla is a singular form, comparative evidence demonstrates that when pronouns are borrowed from one language to another, they at times may jump person and number. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% Cl [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for negative emotionality. Further, the depression-I-talk effect was substantially reduced when controlled for negative emotionality but this was not the case when the negative emotionality-I-talk effect was controlled for depression. These results suggest that the robust empirical link between depression and I-talk largely reflects a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk. Self-referential language using first-person singular pronouns may therefore be better construed as a linguistic marker of general distress proneness or negative emotionality rather than as a specific marker of depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammaticalization is often considered to reflect frequent co-occurrence of certain elements in certain positions. This paper tests the frequency-based account of the grammaticalization of person agreement, comparing the grammaticalization of person agreement in Tabasaran, a Lezgic language, with the syntax of free pronouns in closely related Agul. Our assumption is that the situation in Agul, where person marking is not grammaticalized, approximately reflects a diachronic stage prior to the grammaticalization of person marking in closely related Tabasaran. We find little evidence in support of a frequency-based approach, at least when frequency is treated in terms of global frequencies. We do, however, identify a highly frequent verb that already in Agul appears to regularly associate with the pattern that has generalized to become person agreement in Tabasaran. We suggest specific information structural configurations associated with this verb, which have provided the impetus for the development. More generally, we show that while global measures of frequency may not yield the correct predictions, investigating the syntactic constructions associated with individual lexical items may be more revealing, and provide a more realistic model for reconstructing the paths of syntactic change involving the generalization of existing and quite local patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the grammaticalization of person agreement is a widely-cited and apparently uncontroversial topos of grammaticalization theory, the striking differences in the outcome of subject pronoun, and object pronoun grammaticalization, remain unexplained, and the relevant literature continues to assume a unified grammaticalization pathway. This paper argues that the grammaticalization of object pronouns is fundamentally different to that of subject pronouns. More specifically, although object pronouns may be rapid early grammaticalizers, often losing prosodic independence and cliticizing to a verbal head, they do not advance further to reach the stage of obligatory agreement markers typical of subject agreement. Typically, object markers remain at the stage of Differential Object Indexing, where their realization is conditioned by a bundle of semantic and pragmatic factors exhibiting close parallels to those operative in Differential Object Marking. Evidence from language typology, and from the diachrony of person markers across two millennia of Iranian languages, is adduced to back up these claims. Thus the widely-assumed grammaticalization cline for the grammaticalization of agreement needs to be reconsidered; for object agreement, there is evidently an attractor state, that of Differential Object Indexing, beyond which object agreement seldom proceeds. Finally, explanations grounded in discourse data are proposed, which also account for why obligatory object agreement in the category of person is so rare, while gender and number agreement for objects is far less constrained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second-person pronoun system in Early Modern English was grammatically ambiguous. Playwrights of the period exploited this ambiguity. This paper offers an analysis of the pragmatic functions of T and V pronouns in two of Christopher Marlowe’s plays—Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta. The paper demonstrates that Marlowe uses second-person pronouns to convey information about the social status and the emotions of his characters in a way that can be explained by Roger W. Brown and Albert Gilman’s theory of power and solidarity semantics. The model developed in this paper accounts for 1118 of 1124 second-person pronouns in the two plays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Arts & Social Sciences (JASS) is the property of Sultan Qaboos University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper describes the doubling of free personal pronouns in Agul, an East Caucasian language spoken in Daghestan, Russia. The doubling construction consists of a subject pronoun in the canonical preverbal position, paired with an identical instance of the same pronoun immediately following the verb. The first pronoun is usually adjacent to the "verb-pronoun" combination, though it can optionally be separated by another constituent. In the oral corpus consulted for the analysis, the construction is found most often with the primary verb of speech in clauses introducing a quote (e.g. 'I said I, ...'). I argue that the doubling pattern originated as the conflation of a preverbal subject with a very frequent "verb-subject" word order used with highly topical referents. The function of the doubling construction is therefore postulated to draw additional attention to the referent. A brief comparison of Agul doubling and related phenomena in other languages (e.g. person agreement and clitic doubling) is also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research articles have often materialized through the use of impersonal objective strategies viz. abstract rhetors, passive constructions, and nominalizations. However, intrusive or subjective strategies, such as self-mentions, appear to integrate impersonal structures. As a rhetorical strategy to explicitly portray authorial selves, self-mentions help writers to project themselves into the discourse by marketing themselves and demarcating their original contribution to the field. Here, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted to ex amine explicit authorial presence in a comparable corpus of 40 research articles in ap plied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering, and chemistry by taking into consideration: (i) the frequency of using exclusive first person plural pronouns (we, our, us, and ours); and (ii) the writers' rhetorical functions of pronoun use. The results showed that there are interdisciplinary variations in the frequency and use of self-reference, particularly once the soft disciplines are set against the hard ones. The differing results across the datasets reflect the susceptibility of authorial presence to the rhetorical cultures conditioned by the discipline to which the writers belong. The current results are expected to broaden our understanding of disciplinary variations towards self-mentions usage in academic writings in the four communities, particularly in the under-researched disciplines of environmental engineering and chemistry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic and pragmatic properties of floating person agreement in Sanzhi Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian, Russia). Person agreement enclitics can occur on the verb or on other constituents (NPs, adverbs, or pronouns). In the latter case, they seem to function like constituent focus markers because they emphasize their host, but this effect is limited to elicited sentences. Floating agreement in Sanzhi Dargwa is compared to similar constructions in other Nakh-Daghestanian languages (Udi, Lak) which have been analyzed as synchronic in situ clefts or as diachronically arising from clefts. The paper shows that a synchronic cleft analysis for floating agreement in Sanzhi must be rejected, and it is argued that diachronically they originate from identificational copula constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine four roots of conversational practices that are particularly germane to the understanding how the uses of the word ‘person’ as displays of the concept of person are both products and producers of the intelligibility of such practices. These roots are empirical facts used as if they were necessary truths – Wittgenstein’s ‘hinges’; the resolutions of relevant mereological fallacies; the grammar of indexical expressions, particularly pronouns; ad finally positioning theory, the study of the conversational devices by means of which rights and duties are distributed among the members of a population of human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the history of two little-known third-person pronouns - 3pl. acc. his and 3sg. fem. acc. his - attested only during Middle English. Competing theories of their origins are evaluated and a novel account is proposed. The paper highlights an important gap in our understanding of the history of English oblique pronouns and supplies the most comprehensive description yet published of the distribution of these innovative forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Personal pronouns (we, I, you) in lecture introductions in the arts and science disciplines are analysed. [•] You is the most frequently used personal pronoun. [•] Main functions of personal pronouns are activating prior knowledge and giving instructions or announcements. [•] Arts and science lecturers differ in their use of personal pronouns for student engagement. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, the personal agreement system of the Ngyaltsu variety of Zbu rGyalrong is described, the first such description for this rarely documented Sino-Tibetan language. The agreement pattern is characterised by a direct-inverse system, analysed in detail using the conceptual apparatus from. The system is then compared with those of three neighbouring rGyalrong languages: Eastern rGyalrong, Japhug and Tshobdun, where it is suggested, especially from the behaviour of closed-syllable stems in Eastern rGyalrong, that the person suffixes across rGyalrong are internally structured, the 1 sg suffix having a particularly close relationship with the stem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of nominal morphology in the morphological structure of Inpui, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Naga-Bodo subgroup of Naga group. It describes the noun in the language and discusses nominal classes which constitute the nominal morphology in the language. It is noted that the noun can inflect for gender, number, person and case.

An essay is presented that addresses the author's experience of having been a strip club dancer. Topics include the choices of person and tense for writing about such experiences, problems with drug addiction among strippers, and the views of philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Leibniz, and G. W. F. Hegel on personal identity.

The substitution of the Yo first person-subject pronoun by mi persona as a reference instead of the personal pronoun was studied. The objective was to determine the elements that influence the use of mi persona. Fifteen (15) survey forms and five (5) interviews were applied to Spanish speakers from Mérida. The purpose was (1) to determine whether they used or not mi persona expression as an alternative to yo, and to find out the reasons of this; and (2) to know if speakers would use other expressions to refer themselves different from mi persona, and the situations -public or private- in which they used them. Results show that preference associated with linguistic attitude was the element chosen for using the expression or the personal pronoun. Likewise, it was determined that mi persona is more frequently used by women than men. Contexts -public or private- play a role in the moment of election. Finally, other alternative ways were found: quien les habla or este humilde servidor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of the informal personal pronoun "tu" in the context of the French Revolution of the late 18th century, and in the context of the French theater. Topics discussed include the use of informal personal pronouns and changes in honorific pronouns in France resulting from the Revolution, the use of the pronoun "tu" and the informal address in French theater of the Revolution period, and the concept of equality, as represented in language and linguistic changes of the Revolution.

This study was designed to investigate the development of third-person singular (3SG) - s in children who learn English as a second language (L2). Adopting the usage-based perspective on the learning of inflection, we analyzed spontaneous speech samples collected from 15 English L2 children who were followed over a 2-year period. Assessing the contribution of a wide range of predictors, we show that word frequency, allomorph, lexicon size, inflectional properties of the first language (L1), and months of exposure to English all have impact on English L2 children's use of 3SG - s in obligatory contexts. This study enhances both our understanding of the development of 3SG - s and of child L2 acquisition. The outcomes support a usage-based approach to learning inflection and emphasize the importance of a multifactorial analysis of language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elementary writing instruction is often limited, mainly focused on personal narratives. Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, this article reports on the writing of grade 3-5 bilingual children in a variety of genres. Analysis of their use of first, second, and third person provides insight into their understanding of genre and audience. The results suggest that although students made successful attempts at writing in a variety of genres, they did not have full understanding of the purposes of those genres, and their understanding of the connection to audience was still in development. For Spanishspeaking newcomers, Spanish and English influenced each other. The study of a specific grammar point such as use of person offers deeper understanding of students' writing development, indicating that challenges in choice of grammatical person are rooted in factors such as understanding genre (purpose) and tenor (audience and voice). Implications for instruction are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the views of philosopher Charles S. Peirce regarding the second person pronoun to the views of philosophers including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Émile Benveniste, and Aristotle. Topics include the influence of philosopher Friedrich Schiller on Peirce, the relation of Peirce's thought to that of philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the philosophy of language. Also noted are the notion of linguistic universals, the views of philosopher Ernst Cassirer regarding language, and the role of universals in Peirce's semiotics.

Oral communication skills are now recognised as fundamentally important in engineering workplaces. This recognition is reflected in recent graduate attributes in which "effective communication skills" is included alongside more technical disciplinary knowledge. This paper examines how this graduate attribute - "effective communication skills" and, more specifically, oral presentation skills - is embedded into the teaching and learning of a capstone engineering subject. An analysis of spoken presentations given by students in this subject suggests that being convincing includes students making choices about both the structure of their talks and their use of personal pronouns. The study found, for example, that it was possible to highlight the role of the researcher and establish a strong rapport with the audience through the use of personal pronouns in a talk that followed a traditional Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion structure. We conclude by suggesting that an awareness of these choices and of their disciplinary significance may be of benefit to students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To examine the role of linguistic input in how young, typically developing children use the 3rd person singular -s (3S) inflection. Method: Novel verbs were presented to 16 young children in either 3S contexts (e.g., "The tiger heens") or nonfinite (NF) contexts (e.g., "Will the tiger heen?"). The input was further manipulated for length such that half of the presentations in each context had adjectives modifying the subject. Children were then prompted to use the novel verbs in contexts requiring 3S and in contexts requiring an infinitive form. The children's use of 3S with familiar verbs was also examined. Results: Novel verbs heard only in 3S contexts were more likely to be produced with 3S in obligatory contexts and were more likely to be inappropriately applied to infinitive contexts than novel verbs heard only in NF contexts. Degree of 3S use in obligatory contexts was lower for familiar verbs than for novel verbs heard only in 3S contexts but higher than for novel verbs heard only in NF contexts. Length was not a significant factor. Conclusion: Linguistic input appears to have a strong effect on how young children use the 3S inflection in newly encountered verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a DE SE THEORY of person indexicals, wherein first- and second-person indexical pronouns indicate REFERENCE DE SE (also called SELF-ASCRIPTION). Long observed for first-person pronouns (Castañeda 1977, Kaplan 1977, Perry 1979, inter aim], self-ascription is extended here to second person as well. The person feature of a pronoun specifies the speech-act roles that must be played by the self-ascribers: the speakers (uttering a first-person pronoun), the addressees (interpreting a second-person pronoun), or both (for first-person inclusive). Other agents who are not among the designated self-ascribers for a given pronoun interpret the pronoun indirectly by inferring the self-ascriber's interpretation, a process requiring THEORY OF MIND, that is, the cognitive ability to impute mental states so others (Premack & Woodruff 1978), This de se theory is supported by convergent evidence from multiple domains: (i) It explains a typological universal: first- and second-person plurals always allow associative semantics ('speakers) plus others', 'addressee(s) plus others') rather than requiring regular plural semantics ('speakers only', 'addressees only') (Greenberg 1988, Noyer 1992, Cysouw 2003, Bobaljik 2008). (ii) It belongs to a family of approaches that solve the problem of the essential indexical (Perry 1979). (iii) It correctly predicts observed patterns of indexical pronoun production and comprehension by two populations lacking a fully developed theory of mind: typically developing children in the stage before theory of mind has developed, and children with autism, (iv) It correctly predicts the interpretation of second-person pronouns in utterances with multiple addressees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal pronouns belong to the most conservative parts of grammar; that is, they are diachronically fairly stable, as suggested by the fact that in many cases they can be traced back etymologically to or even beyond the earliest stages of reconstructible language history. This is why so far not much progress has been made in unraveling the genesis of personal pronouns: the number of cases where it has been possible to determine their origin is severely limited. Still, some data do exist and allow for the reconstruction of some major lines of grammatical evolution. As we hope to show in this paper, this evolution is the product of a handful of crosslinguistically fairly uniform cognitive and communicative strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iberica is the property of Asociacion Europea de Lenguas para Fines Especificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper investigates the conditioning of the variation between two first-person plural forms in contemporary spoken Brazilian Portuguese, an older pronoun nós used with first-person plural agreement and a newer pronoun a gente, derived from an NP meaning 'the people', used with third-person singular agreement. This is part of a broader change in the language involving the breakdown of verbal agreement as third-person marking extends to the domains of first- and second-person. We consider the conditioning of use of these forms in spoken Brazilian Portuguese from Fortaleza and uncover a phenomenon that as yet has not been noted in relation to this variation, namely frequency. We find that the high type frequency of a gente contributes to the spreading use of this form, and the high token frequency of nós in specific constructions slows it down. We predict that these highly frequent constructions (such as nos temos 'we have', digamos 'let's say' and vamos + V-INF 'let's V') may remain a last vestige of nós in Brazilian Portuguese as a gente comes to take over the realm of first-person plural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pronoun I indexes the speaker or writer in place and time but also situates him or her in the moral order as the person responsible for what is uttered (Mühlhäusler and Harré 1990). Consequently, this paper asks (1) what gentlemen of the Early and Late Modern England could say about themselves in the first person and (2) whether there were any register or diachronic differences in typical self-reference. This study relies on integrationist social theory and employs a set of quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of recurrent word clusters extracted from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and its Extension. The results point to increasing self-reference and the prominence of mental verb clusters that often serve interpersonal functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First- and second-person pronouns have been one of the centerpieces of the literature on language and gender differences in Japanese (Shibamoto Smith 2003). Most of our understandings of real (empirical) pronominal use comes from investigations of female speakers of standard Japanese. Our understandings of how dialect speakers and/or men use pronominal forms in daily linguistic practice are not well informed. This article undertakes an investigation of Japanese men's uses of pronominal forms; each participant was born and reared in the Kansai (western) area of Japan and uses a dialect variety of Japanese (Hanshinkan Dialect). Literature which addresses pronominal usage in Japanese indicates that these forms are risky since they always serve to position speaker and hearer in specific ways relative to one another; as such, pronouns are something to be avoided. The findings of this paper indicate that pronouns are used by Japanese men: however the uses are contextually governed and have little to do with delineating speaker from hearer and have more to do with specific conversational goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the expression of third person in older and contemporary varieties in English. It explores diachronic evidence that will support the author's hypothesis that English word-initial th- has been generalized as a marker of third person. The author suggests that the eventual generalization of th- is connected to the loss of an isomorphic third person verbal marker in Old English. She determines the distribution of Old English nominal and verbal þ, and examines Middle English third person marking. She has maintained that contemporary English th- corresponds to third person rather than to definiteness.

This article explores variation in the use of the pronouns nous and on for first-person plural reference in a substantial corpus of French-language Internet chat discourse. The results indicate that on is nearly categorically preferred to nous, which is in line with previous research on informal spoken French. A qualitative analysis of nous tokens suggests that the use of this variant is limited to certain contexts, such as jokes, imitations and role-plays, or in order to refer to a group "seen from the outside." This research has implications for the study of discourse produced in electronic environments in relation to speech and writing. In concluding, the fate of nous is discussed and directions for future research on computer-mediated communication are advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the description using Spanish verbs. It discusses that description of places, people, and things plays an essential and practical role in all introductory Spanish classes. The three Spanish verbs "ser, estar and tener" are often the most useful for description, but are rarely introduced in combination as a unit at the beginning of a typical introductory Spanish course.

This article discusses the structure of personal pronouns in Russian. A German research project studied the personal pronoun in modern standard and vernacular Russian, and the results are presented. The syntactic behavior of pronouns was the focus of the study, and a comparison to personal pronouns in German was also included. Three classes of personal pronouns are described: the strong pronoun, the weak pronoun and the clitic pronoun. The pronoun types have up to three attributes determining them: the functional case, the accentuating and characteristic person and number. The positional possibilities of Russian personal pronouns are illustrated.

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressive morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper treats the two Lakota independent personal pronoun sets. Although morphologically simple, the definition of the usage of these pronouns and the choice of the particular set is quite involved. The factors involved seem to be partly distributional and partly semantic. The 3rd person set is more complex in its usage than the 1st and 2nd person set, partly because 3rd person can be morphologically unmarked in Lakota. One set can occur in company with a coreferent noun and is in a sense ‘‘deletable’’. The other set is less easily deletable and often constitutes a core element of the sentence. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction exclusively in the 1st person singular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration of a grammatical error seen in William Shakespeare's "Hamlet." The author presents a singular grammatical occurrence in the text surrounding the use of the royal plural salutation, along with several critical interpretations by scholars in response to it. The author's views regarding the thematic implications of the form is presented.

The Person Case Constraint (PCC) blocks a 1st/2nd person DP from Agree and Case assignment if it is separated from a probe by an intervener. I examine four separate strategies that circumvent the PCC: through giving the blocked DP case and agreement that would not otherwise be possible (absolutive displacement Basque; Jahnsson’s Rule in Finnish), by realizing the intervener elsewhere (3 to 5 Demotion in French), or by realizing the DP’s person features differently (Object Camouflage in Georgian). The striking feature these strategies share is that they are restricted to PCC contexts and not freely available. This makes it impossible to view them as paraphrase. Stating the conditions on their distribution requires reference to the failed PCC derivation, that is trans-derivational comparison. I extend the reference set computation of Fox (1995, 2000) and Reinhart (1995, 1999) to account for these strategies as the addition of a φ-probe, and suggest an extension to dependent Case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Appalachian English existentials, which employ they as the so-called "expletive" (e.g., They is a big creek yet). Given the morphological identity of expletive they with the third-person plural pronoun (e.g., They are happy), the question arises as to why the verb appears in the singular form in the existential despite the expletive's apparent plurality; this question arises in light of Cardinaletti (1997), who observes that cross-linguistically, Nominative Case, marked expletives trigger agreement. To explain the Appalachian contradiction, this work pursues the proposal that Appalachian expletive they is "weak," lacking a value for its number feature. This allows us to maintain the idea that the Appalachian expletive does trigger agreement, despite appearances to the contrary. The article also explores (rarer) cases of Appalachian existentials with an apparently plural verb (e.g., They are another one down the street), and discusses three possible analyses of such grammars, where (1) the expletive might have a [+ plural] number feature, (2) the verb might actually be singular (despite appearances to the contrary), or (3) in the case of a plural postverbal subject (They have been some fellows . . .), the "associate" might raise at LF to agree with the verb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the origin of historical imperative in Russia. Expression of both the meaning of a sudden, arbitrary action and iterative or intensive semantics in Macedonian and Bulgarian historical imperative; Explanations on the use of Russian historical imperative with a subject of any number and person; Reconsideration of the result of the Russian historical imperative from the formal coincidence between the imperative and the aorist iti-verbs.

From a historical perspective, personal pronouns in Romance languages display a tendency to undergo changes in syntactic status in a particular order, namely; strong > weak > clitic. This article discusses the possible reasons behind the final step of this sequence of development, that is, that from a weak form to clitic status. It will be argued that the external trigger for this kind of diachronic change has to be a morphophonological one; if a weak pronoun is morphophonologically reduced over time, language learners may at some point come to analyze the pronoun as a clitic. A number of syntactic properties are expected to change as a consequence of the switch from weak form to clitic. This view gives support to Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) approach which argues for a principled link between the morphophonological make-up of pronouns and their syntactic status. Furthermore, it is shown that the Italian dative pronoun loro ‘to them’ during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries underwent changes that corroborate the above hypothesis in an interesting way. Originally, loro was a weak pronoun but in some central Italian varieties, above all in the town of Siena, a reduced form lo’ emerged, which had clitic properties. Arguably, the phonological change preceded the syntactic one. For a period, both loro and lo’ are attested in rather free distribution. Later on, however, the Sienese grammar makes a clear distinction between them, analyzing lo’ as a dative clitic and loro as a strong pronoun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which investigated the social significance of second person pronoun variation and alternation in professional-victim interactions in parallel institutions created to address violence against women in Brazil. Discussion on domestic violence; Code alternation and contextualization theory in the study; Overview of the Brazilian Portuguese second person address system.

Investigates the meaning of 'become' becomes 'be' verb stem in copulative word groups of Zulu in Africa. Expression of the copulative groups; Determination of the subcategories of copulatives; Identification of terminology pertaining to copulative verb stem.

Examines Phoenician language in the third person singular feminine with the suffixing conjugation affixed to an object pronoun based on the research of W. Rollig. Remarks on the use of the perfect in a precative sense; Incorrect demonstration of the participial uses of nkst and qbt; Morphology of nkst; Role of inflectional morphemes in the third feminine singular.