Poor pronoun systems and what they teach us

Authors

  • Daniel Harbour Queen Mary University of London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/12.3314

Keywords:

pronoun, person, number, typology, agreement

Abstract

The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (i) author–nonauthor, (ii) participant–nonparticipant, (iii) singular–nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters (Harbour 2011a, 2014a, 2014b), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) recent reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (i)–(iii) are universally obligatory. 

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Published

2015-01-21