Who Is She? The Syntax and Semantics of Pronouns

How do we know who "he" is? And how does "he" differ from "himself" when we interpret it? In this week's episode, we talk about the syntax and semantics of pronouns: how we can place them in sentences, how they link up to variables, and the role of context in how we interpret them.
This is Topic #93!
This week's tag language: Macedonian!
Related videos:
Referential Treatment: The Syntax of Binding - • Binding Theory and Int...
Up, Up and Away: The Verb Phrase-Internal Subject Hypothesis - • Where Do Subjects Star...
Relatively Close: The Syntax of Relative Clauses - • How Can Sentences Work...
Last episode:
The Main Event: Event Semantics - • How Do We Match Verbs ...
Other of our semantics videos:
Downward Spiral: Negative Polarity Items - • Why Can't "Any" Go Jus...
Topic of Focus: Information Structure - • How Do We Signal What'...
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - • How Do We Decide What'...
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, on different kinds of events, at: www.thelingspace.com/episode-93/
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We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
Most of the information for this episode was taken from Heim and Kratzer's 1998 book, Semantics in Generative Grammar, and from Yasutaka Sudo's dissertation, available here: dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/...
Here's something else that is available online and is pretty accessible, Elizabeth Coppock's Semantics Boot Camp: eecoppock.info/semantics-boot-...
Looking forward to next time!

[@yassi8814]

I study linguistics at UCLA and I have to say that your videos have always been super beneficial for me!!!!

[@thelingspace]

So glad to be able to help! ^_^

[@lailedcat]

I've brought up Hiberno-English a few times in comments before, and I'm gonna do it again! Because it's actually an exception to what you said at the beginning. You COULD actually say "Sarah saw Arthur help herself" but it requires some context. The 'herself' has to refer to a third person, and it's taken as a given that both the speaker and the receiver know who it is. You hear people in Ireland saying things like "I was talking to himself" without necessarily having referred to the 'himself' previously in that conversation. It's just assumed that the other person will figure it out or that there'll be clarification later (usually it's someone of importance, like a spouse). You also sometimes hear "Is it yourself!" as a greeting. I'm pretty sure it's a linguistic quirk adopted from the way reflexive pronouns are used in Irish. Anyway, just a fun thing I wanted to add! Edit: Admittedly I do have to do a bit of mental gymnastics to come up with a scenario for the "Sarah saw Arthur helping herself" to work in my mind (the other two are things I hear on a regular basis though), but the general gist of what I'm trying to say is that at times, reflexive pronouns in Hiberno-English _do not_ necessarily have to refer to an earlier part of the clause.

[@eruyommo]

So, the pronoun is used less as a reflexive pronoun and more like a simple reverencial pronoun?

[@lailedcat]

Erómeon mmmm not exactly! I wouldn't say that it's more referential than reflexive; it is still used as a reflexive pronoun in the same ways it would be in other dialects of English. It just sometimes gets used in sentences where it seems to break the norms pointed out at the start of this video. In the case of "I was talking to himself", for example, 'himself' can't be replaced with 'him' for some reason, unless the 'him' in question had either been referred to previously, or if 'he' were actually visible and the speaker were pointing at him. Does that make sense? I don't know that this explanation is any good at all, haha.

[@eruyommo]

So, most time it's a reflexive pronoun, but sometimes it's something like an undetermined referential distant third person. Weird.

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, this is quite an interesting phenomenon! I'll have to look into this more. Thanks for bringing it up! ^_^

[@qwertyTRiG]

lailedcat It's almost functioning more as a name than a pronoun, isn't it? Herself = her indoors = the wife.

[@qwertyTRiG]

There's so much more to linguistics than the historical stuff that first caught my interest (in etymological dictionaries and later in John McWhorter's book _The Power of Babel_). Some of this stuff is completely new to me. One thing. Pronouns work quite differently in spoken and signed languages (and one can imagine them working differently again in a language which was purely written). I'd love to see more on that.

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about linguistics is that more or less wherever you enter into it, there's a lot more that's really interesting you wouldn't have thought of. I came for the psycho- and neurolinguistics, and then really got into phonetics and phonology and acquisition, etc. The pronouns in sign language is an excellent point - we've been planning to make a sign language video for ages, and we've had discussions in the past for collaborations with sign language experts on that. I'm really hoping we manage to get that to work out soon, it's a topic I'd love to cover. ^_^

[@qwertyTRiG]

The Ling Space Historical linguistics and sociolinguistics are still my main interests, but I've started a course in Deaf Studies. We do sign linguistics next year; for this year, we are studying Language Acquisition and Deafness and, for some reason, Aspects of Written Language. The former has some introduction to Chomskey, and the latter has just covered the Great Divide theory and the social implications of the printing press. Fascinating stuff.

[@fantasdeck]

It would have been clearer to just specify that the first x denotes the scope (the domain for which the other two x's apply). For a universal scope, the applied domain is every constant in the domain of people (i.e., every person). Scope seems quite relevant to this discussion, especially.

[@misterb4352]

Thanks for the Videos. I start to love Linguistics but I'm also conscious that there are a lot of things i've got to learn. Keep it up with the Vidéos.

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for the comment! I hope you can learn a lot from going through our videos. ^_^

[@alexolas1246]

"Y'know, for my fantasy conlang, I might use words for 'this' and medial/distal 'that' as pro-- AAAA NEW LINGSPACE VIDEO DROP EVERYTHING"

[@notoriouswhitemoth]

so like kore/sore/are in Japanese, corresponding to first, second, and third person?

[@alexolas1246]

nah, all of them would be for the third person, sort of like how it works in Basque.

[@thelingspace]

Haha, thanks so much! That really means a lot. Hope you liked it! ^_^

[@keegster7167]

It's nice that I'm not the only one here making a conlang! :) By the way, that sort of happens in Latin too. The difference between demonstratives and pronouns is pretty fluid, so pronouns can become demonstratives and medial/distal demonstratives can be used like pronouns.

[@alexolas1246]

I was actually wondering a bit about the specific semantics of when/why one would use a proximal/medial/distal demonstrative as a pronoun. Do you know anything about that?

[@JacobFromOmaha]

I kept hoping that you'd get to deixis, but by the end of the video we were still on third person pronouns... Great video though, I really enjoyed it! Ties to math and formal logic always pique my interest. No idea what half of your references were about, but I almost laughed aloud on the bus when you gave your "clone" example. So happy you're back! Keep up the fantastic work.

[@SwashBuckTief]

So many Orphan Black references! I loved it. Also, yes, please discuss gender-neutral pronouns.

[@thelingspace]

Always great when people get the references! And yeah, we will be coming back to that in the future. ^_^

[@fantasdeck]

Also, "My clone wears an eyepatch," is true because of vacuous truth. In fact, for any term which refers to the empty set, all predications on it and its negations are all true.

[@nigeliscool657]

you're back!

[@thelingspace]

Yep! It's been pretty busy here, but we're hoping to get back to a regular schedule. We miss getting to share stuff with people. ^_^

[@SwashBuckTief]

A non-reflexive, non-binary pronoun: the freest of them all.

[@SessileNomad]

Yall need some acoustic foam up, quite a bit of room noise going on.

[@thelingspace]

Thanks for the suggestion! We'll keep working on improving sound quality.

[@jimnewton4534]

I'd say: everybody thought of himself as unique, rather than themselves. Does this show my age? Should I just accepted that the language has changed? It just feels wrong to me.

[@keegster7167]

I would say that too, although I would only use everyone. I think that it's not only to do with age. There are many ways of saying the same thing, and people have their own personal styles.

[@plerpplerp5599]

Language changes. Just over a hundred years or more the past tense of build was builded not built as it is now. Grammarians like Robert Lowth et al. are the ones that make up arbitrary rules about language usage which are handed down from English teacher to English teacher.

[@victorfergn]

Can you recommend me books about linguistics?

[@thelingspace]

As a general start, I usually recommend The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, or A Little Book of Language by David Crystal. But do you have particular topics you're interested in?

[@victorfergn]

Hey! Cool, you replied thanks. I usually like rigorous books (the ones that students study at college) but I'm just getting started (I'm a graduate physics student, I'm just guessing that I can handle rigorous material since I'm new at linguistics... but I like having a certain parameter of my goals so I can train myself to achieve that level) so I guess I'll be more certain about specific topics as they unfold in the books I read. I don't know if I'm being too vague... but don't worry. :) Thank you so much! Your videos are great and I loved the interviews you filmed.

[@thelingspace]

Thanks so much! Glad you liked them. I think personally starting off with the Crystal book may be a good choice for you, then. I can recommend textbook type books in a few of the forms that we discussed before - for instance, I think Henry Rogers's A Course in Phonetics is a very good intro to that field, and Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics by Eva Fernandez and Helen Smith Cairns is good for starting off there. But it'll be easier to recommend stuff if you know where you want to jump in. Good luck! ^_^

[@victorfergn]

Thanks! I'll try to find those books and then see where they lead me. I know it's a field that involves a lot of things, so sorry again for being so vague but certainly in the future I'll be able to be more specific; Thanks a lot!!!

[@plerpplerp5599]

Where English teachers and grammarians really come unstuck is with English pronouns which notoriously don't fit into the Latin usage of nominative and accusative forms causing endless pointless discussions about whether you should say "It is I" or "It is me".

[@sulimanam9560]

الله لا يسامحك يا دكتور رياض طيفور 😲