A Typology of Non-Prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns

Discussion questions regarding this article (download):

@article {helmbrecht.j:2015:non-prototypical,
    author = {Helmbrecht, Johannes},
    date = {2015},
    doi = {10.1016/j.pragma.2014.10.004},
    issn = {0378-2166},
    journaltitle = {Journal of Pragmatics},
    pages = {176–189},
    subtitle = {synchrony and diachrony},
    title = {A Typology of Non-Prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns},
    volume = {88},
}

Discussion questions

• When speaking of non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns, the article gives many cases in which some personal pronoun changes its original/primary person reference or number, but in all of the discussed cases it remains in the domain of person (or impersonal) marking, never something different. What can be said of cases in which personal pronouns shift into a completely different category? How common is it and what are the attested shifts? I have two cases in mind from British languages:

  • One is the Welsh preverbal particles fe- and mi- (etymologically from 3sg.masc and 1sg, respectively), which have very interesting textual and discursive functions that are not personal.
  • The other is the ‘vocative’ marker you in English (Wake up, you lazy sloth!). þu/thou used to be used similarly (see thou pron. 2 in the OED).

• I’m not familiar with many of the languages mentioned in the article, but it seems to deal only with languages with a closed set personal pronouns (cf. Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990)), as opposed to ‘open-ended’ languages like Japanese and Korean. Are there ‘non-prototypical’ uses of the linguistic elements which are normally used for person marking in these languages as well, or are they too loaded with semantic and pragmatic information to be used non-prototypically?

• How common is it for such non-prototypical uses to be areal? We all know the 2pl > 2sg.hon development in European languages (IE and non-IE alike), but are there other attested cases of non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns spreading areally?