My pronouns are they/them: Talking about pronouns changes how pronouns are understood

Null Subjects Are Reflexives, Not Pronouns

It has been a prevalent assumption in the literature that phonetically null Subjects of finite clauses are pronouns. This paper examines in detail this empirical generalization and argues that null Subjects are reflexives rather than pronouns. The critical point at stake here, which has obscured appropriate classification, is that null Subjects are reflexives in top-command positions, i.e. refl...

Singular Donkey Pronouns Are Semantically Singular

A certain prima facie implausible idea about the semantics of donkey pronouns has found a surprising number of adherents (Davies 1981, Lappin 1989, Neale 1990, Lappin and Francez 1994, Yoon 1994, 1996, Krifka 1996a) and even crept into a textbook (Larson and Segal 1995).1 According to this idea, syntactically singular donkey pronouns like it in (1) are semantically numberless, so that (2) provi...

Doubling Clitics are Pronouns: Reduce and Interpret

Controversy has plagued the question of whether verbal “object markers” (OMs) are object pronouns cliticized to the verb or realizations of object agreement. Beginning with data from Amharic, we develop a reliable and consistent diagnostic for resolving this question. Specifically, we claim that OMs should be analyzed as clitic pronouns if and only if they are unable to double nominals that are...

Emphatic Pronouns*

Translations of Ambiguous Hindi Pronouns to Possible Bengali Pronouns

In a Hindi to Bengali transfer based machine translation system the baseline lexical transfer module replaces a Hindi word by its most frequent Bengali translation. Some pronouns in Hindi can have multiple translations in Bengali. The choices of actual translations have big impact on the accessibility of the translated sentence. The list of Hindi pronouns is small and their corresponding Bengal...