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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2019
Chapter 5 presents a fully procedural analysis of personal pronouns in English. Pronouns, it is argued encode procedures which operate at a sub-personal level. Features including gender, number and person features function purely syntactically and do not contribute directly to the semantics of the overall message. That is, they are not conceptual. Rather, the cognitive processes triggered by use of a pronoun function to constrain potential referents to a sub-personally identifiable set. The differences in interpretation that arise when a speaker chooses to place contrastive prosodic stress on a pronoun are discussed, along with examples where the choice of pronoun does not play a role in reference resolution but contributes to other aspects of the speaker’s overall meaning. The discussion focuses specifically on the communication of expressive effects and has significance not just for our understanding of pronouns, but for our understanding of procedural meaning more generally.
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