Non-Prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns and Their Grammaticalization in Chinese

With an interesting typological study on the non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns, Helmbrecht (2015) demonstrates that form-meaning mismatch with regards to pronouns is essentially based discourse. It claimed referents dynamically keep changing a particular context, and some kind additional pragmatic meaning tends be encoded into them. Based his study, proposes two hypotheses about how phenomena at issue could grammaticalized: (i) Plural may shift singular ones; (ii) third-person second- or first-person ones, but not vice versa. Drawing more comprehensive perspective, this article presents various patterns in Mandarin Chinese supplement Helmbrecht’s generalization adjust concerning grammaticalization (Hu, 2018).