I. Sumerian and Georgian: A study in Comparative Philology

Author(s):  
M. Tseretheli

Personal Pronouns.—Georgian (with Lazian, etc.) makes no distinction of genders in personal pronouns (as in general Georgian makes no distinction of genders). Herein Georgian corresponds perfectly to Sumerian. The personal pronouns in Sumerian are also very like to Georgian, though the same cannot be said of other pronouns. The 1st person singular is regularly me-e in Sumerian, and in Georgian me = I = Lazian ma, man = Mingrelian ma = Svanian mi. The 2nd person is in Sumerian za-e = Georgian šen = Mingrelian si = Lazian si = Svanian si. As to the 3rd person, it is most interesting that Georgian and the other languages of the Georgian group have no special pronoun to designate directly the 3rd person; in Sumerian it is the same. Both Sumerian and Georgian borrow the pronoun for the 3rd person from demonstrative pronouns: Sumerian ni (rectus) and na, (obliquas) for persons, and bi and ba for inanimate objects; Georgian is, igi, Mingrelian , ena, θena, Lazian ham, Svanian ada, ala. But in Georgian the root of the pronoun of the 3rd person appears in the genitive, dative, and other cases, and this root being m we can compare it with Sumerian demonstrative bi and ba. Indeed, we have in Georgian , is igi = he she, it, but in genitive m-is, dative m-as, etc.; in Mingrelian , ena, θena = he, she, it, but in genitive m-u-ši, etc. In Lazian as independent personal pronoun 3rd person, the demonstrative ham, = this, is used, but the pronominal nominative is m-u-q, genitive m-u-ši, etc. It must be remembered, moreover, that in Lazian the demonstrative pronouns have the root of the personal pronoun 3rd person m, and that is why they replace the personal pronoun 3rd person.

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-190
Author(s):  
Markus Bader ◽  
Yvonne Portele

Abstract Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN PAYNE

English genitive noun-phrase coordinations follow two patterns. The first is the single genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs solely on the final coordinate, e.g. Mary and Jane's; and the second is the multiple genitive, in which exponence of the genitive case occurs on all coordinates, e.g. Mary's and Jane's. When either of the coordinates is a personal pronoun, difficult choices have to be made about the form of the pronoun. These difficulties arise especially with the single genitive, which is judged to be totally ungrammatical in coordinations like *my wife and I's or *my wife and my. On the other hand, the alternative use of the multiple genitive, my wife's and my, conflicts with a preference for the single genitive when the coordinates are felt to constitute a single unit. In this article, we first conduct a corpus-based analysis for genitive coordinations with personal pronouns, based on the British National Corpus. This, supplemented by some non-standard examples from web-based sources, gives some insight into the choices actually made by native speakers. We then provide a theoretical account of the syntactic problems that genitive coordinations with pronouns create. This account is shown to be compatible solely with an analysis of the English ’s genitive as an inflectional affix.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 180
Author(s):  
Winci Firdaus

This study on relation of pronouns and affixation discusses about pronouns structure and affixes usage in Mooi language. Pronouns structures in Mooi language include personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, interrogative pronouns and demonstrative pronouns. The pronouns forms in Mooi language recognize gender forms and will experience sound changes if they are side by side with the first, second and third personal pronouns. On the other hand, affixations in Mooi language include preffixes, confixes, time marker confixes and personal confixes. The method used in this research is synchronic descriptif method, and the data collecting technique is spoken and listening technique. The data analysis technique is generalisation analysis technique that include several stages of forms and units determination in the corpus to morphology generalisation examination. ABSTRAKKajian tentang relasi pronomina dan afiksasi ini membahas tentang struktur kata ganti dan penggunaan afiks pada bahasa Mooi. Struktur kata ganti pada bahasa Mooi meliputi pronomina persona, pronomina milik, pronomina penanya dan pronomina penujuk. Bentuk pronomina dalam bahasa Mooi mengenal bentuk gender dan akan mengalami perubahan bunyi apabila berdampingan dengan kata ganti orang ke I, II, dan III. Sedangkan afikasasi pada bahasa Mooi meliputi prefiks, konfiks, konfiks penanda waktu dan konfiks persona. Metode yang digunakan dalam peneltian ini adalah metode deskriptif sinkronis, dengan teknik pengumpulan data adalah teknik cakap dan simak. Teknik analisis data yaitu teknik analisis generalisasi yang meliputi beberapa tahapan dari penentuan bentuk dan satuan dalam korpus sampai pada pemeriksaan generalisasi morfologi.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Clare Patterson ◽  
Petra Schumacher

German personal and demonstrative pronouns have distinct preferences in their interpretation; personal pronouns are more flexible in their interpretation but tend to resolve to a prominent antecedent, while demonstratives have a strong preference for a non-prominent antecedent. However, less is known about how prominence information is used during the process of resolution, particularly in the light of two- stage processing models which assume that reference will normally be to the most accessible candidate. We conducted three experiments investigating how prominence information is used during the resolution of gender-disambiguated personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. While the demonstrative pronoun required additional processing compared to the personal pronoun, prominence information did not affect resolution in shallow conditions. It did, however, affect resolution under deep processing conditions. We conclude that prominence information is not ruled out by the presence of stronger resolution cues such as gender. However, the deployment of prominence information in the evaluation of candidate antecedents is under strategic control.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Faizal Risdianto

This library research aimed at finding the three aspect of discourse analysis: contextual, grammatical and lexical aspect of Michael Heart’s song lyrics entitled “We will not go down (Song for Gaza). After analysis it can be found that the life experience and background of the song writer and singer is closely related to the idea proposes within the song lyrics. Whereas, the result of the grammatical and lexical analysis gives a depiction of cohesion and coherence of the song discourse of “We will not Go Down (Song for Gaza)”. There are eight (8) forms of first plural personal pronoun of “We”, four (4) second plural personal pronoun of ‘You” and seven (7) third personal pronouns in various forms. On the other side, it is difficult to find lexical aspects of this song discourse. There is only one form of anaphoric repetition. The repetition of the sentence “We Will Not Go Down” seven times is to influence the hearers whether they are supporters or opponents of the idea brought by the singer/the author that whatever happens Palestinian people will not surrender to every force, nation or people that want to colonialize them. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-133
Author(s):  
Franziska Humphreys-Schottmann

AbstractValéry’s dream of the creation of a poésie pure is determined by a fundamental tension between two contradictory aspirations. On the one hand, he inherits French rationalism when he tries to develop a poetical praxis based on a logical-mathematical calculus, in which anything vague and unclear should disappear. On the other hand, this strictly formalized language revolves around the notion of moi pur and therefore subscribes to a hypertrophied subjectivism. The paradoxical logic of personal pronouns described by Émile Benveniste is at the origin of Valéry’s project: The moi pur is both, the personal pronoun that identifies the concrete speaker and the structural function of the universal invariant. Ineluctably affected by this pronominal shifting, the reader is, above all, at stake in the poéésie pure. In an attempt to unfold the aporetical constructions resulting from this paradox, this textual analysis focuses on some of the main rhetorical figures of Valpoéry’s work. A close reading of Narcisse parle reveals the specific moments of permanent self-variation by which the popoésie pure constantly subverts itself. Poeisis resists any kind of rigid formalism, any subjugation of its rhetorical potential and any attempt to escape the ever-sliding sense of the metaphor. We can thus affirm that the aporias revealed by the popoésie pure evidence hence the conditions of poetical representation itself.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-362
Author(s):  
Helen de Hoop

Abstract The loss of a personal pronoun. Why they will not be saying hun anymoreThe personal pronoun hun ‘them’ meets a lot of criticism in Dutch society, not just from language purists, but from language users in general. This can be attributed to a strong mistrust of the pronoun, given that it is well-known for violating no less than two prescriptive rules, one of which prohibits its use as a subject, and the other its use as a direct object or complement of a preposition. This has resulted in a tendency to avoid the use of this personal pronoun across the board. Despite the fact that hun ‘them’ as a personal pronoun has the advantage of exclusively referring to animate or even human individuals, I argue that it is fighting a losing battle with the other personal pronouns that are used to express third person plural. I conclude that it will withdraw from the competition in order to commit itself entirely to its function as a possessive pronoun ‘their’, in which capacity it is unique.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Nur Hafiz Abdurahman

This study aimed to find evidence regarding the use of personal pronouns in the discourses produced by males and females. Personal pronouns were chosen as the object of analysis, as several studies has suggested them as one of the features that may distinguish the gender of the authors. This study analysed publically available corpus, Rovereto Twitter N-Gram Corpus (RTC), utilized by Herdagdelen (2013). It is gender-of-the-author tagged, which makes the author’s gender analysis easier. The corpus was analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2014). From AntConc’s concordance analysis, it was found that women utilised more personal pronouns, especially the ones that can create closer bond. On the other hand, men have greater tendency to distant themselves using generic pronouns than women. In conclusion, men and women in this study may use personal pronouns differently. Keyword: Personal Pronoun, Twitter, AntConc


1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Vallée

Personal and demonstrative pronouns ('I,’ ‘you,’ ‘s/he,’ ‘we,’ the plural 'you,’ ‘they,’ ‘this’ and ‘these’) are notorious for challenging any theory of natural language. Singular pronouns have received much attention from linguists and philosophers alike during the last three decades. Plural pronouns, on the other hand, have been neglected, especially by philosophers. I want to fill this gap and suggest accounts of ‘we,’ the plural ‘you,’ and ‘they.'Intuitively, singular and plural personal pronouns are ‘counterparts.' Any account of personal pronouns should make sense of this intuition. However, the latter is not very sophisticated and, as we move along, it will be reexamined and relativized. As we shall see, plural pronouns are much more than mere counterparts of the familiar singular ones. It is well known that third person singular pronouns have puzzling behaviors, acting as co-referential terms, bound variables, or unbound anaphora. But co-reference, binding, and unbound anaphora are not confined to the usual examples and extend, in a way, to plural pronouns. My discussion of the latter is partly motivated by this particular behavior.


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