Bhat’s
Pronouns starts with a summary of this issue. Based mostly on functional considerations, he concludes that ‘personal pronouns’ on the one hand and ‘proforms’ on the other make up separate categories, with third person pronouns belonging to different categories depending on the language. Given the obvious differences between the two groups, I am inclined to agree.
KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 4:44 pm
The most straightforward solution I know of is to dispense with strictly separate parts of speech as a concept, and instead work with a nested hierarchy of lexical categories. So you'll typically have one category of all nominals, of which personal pronouns and non-personal pronouns are (potentially the same, potentially different) subcategories somewhere down the hierarchy. The exact form of the hierarchy will of course depend very much on the language in question.
Personally, as I’ve mentioned before, my favourite approach to parts of speech is
François’s: look at the syntactic (and morphological, I suppose) positions in which each word can occur, then define word classes such that each class can occur in different environments. This has the advantage of allowing the rigorous definition of parts of speech, relying only on emic facts. While François never mentions a hierarchy of word classes, this method still allows allows us to define a hierarchy (something which I agree is a good idea): if there happen to be several word classes which all occur in similar environments, it makes sense to group them as ‘nominals’ or ‘pronouns’ or what have you, with all the finer-grained word classes as subclasses of that larger class.
There are admittedly some problems with defining word classes purely semantically. Most prominently, there are some word classes which are typically defined semantically (‘interrogative pronouns’ are a standard example, but also ‘pronouns’ more generally) or even phonologically (the usual case with ‘ideophones’). I personally see the syntactic definitions as primary, with the other distinctions cross-cutting the syntactic word classes.
zompist wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 5:46 pm
At a high level, pronouns do form a nice category: they are words that form an entire NP.
Only in English! Lots of languages (perhaps the majority) allow a single common noun to act as an entire NP, just like pronouns do.
They are always deictic, taking a meaning from the context, and not descriptive. This covers not only personal pronouns but interrogatives, demonstratives, and indefinite pronouns.
Bhat notes that this definition is problematic:
D.N.S. Bhat wrote:
It is possible, for example, to regard a general term like human as standing for several more specific terms like man, woman, boy, girl, etc. In what sense do pronouns stand for nouns and these general terms do not? … On the other hand, the notion of 'standing for' something else is completely unsuitable for characterizing first and second person pronouns. This is evident from the fact that any other noun or pronoun that we try to use instead of these pronouns would fail to provide the crucial kind of meanings that they are meant to denote.
In some languages, like Japanese, pronouns overlap with nouns in a way that's hard to disentangle. This is often presented in a way that's needlessly exoticizing, IMHO: there are plenty of European equivalents to Japanese usage. But Japanese (and also Portuguese) force us to give up the idea that pronouns should be a limited class and etymologically non-transparent.
Also Chalcatongo Mixtec (though only for third person; first and second persons have more normal pronouns). And then there are languages which have no pronouns and rely entirely on verbal cross-referencing! (Strangely enough, I can’t find any examples, but I’m
sure I read something about such systems a while ago.)