Personal pronoun

Abstract

Personal pronouns: (i) occur in syntactic positions typical of NPs, serve the grammatical roles NPs have, and as such show Case distinctions in language having morphological case, but can still differ in their distributional properties. (ii) are referentially dependent on an available antecedent, grammatically encoded, or available in the discourse/context, linking a linguistic expression/utterance to persons involved in the discourse. (iii) are semantically ‘empty’, do not denote an individual or entity. That means they don’t intrinsically have a lexical conceptual structure. (iv) are a closed class of forms, characterized solely by their grammatical features: person, class and number; some languages mark clusivity or honorificity features.