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On the genesis of personal pronouns: Some conceptual sources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2014

Bernd Heine  and
Kyung-An Song
Bernd Heine
Affiliation:
University of Cologneand Chonnam National University
Kyung-An Song*
Affiliation:
University of Cologneand Chonnam National University
*
Correspondence addresses: Bernd Heine, Department of Linguistics and African Studies, University of Köln, 50923 Köln, Germany. E-mail: bernd.heine@uni-koeln.de.
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Abstract

Personal pronouns belong to the most conservative parts of grammar; that is, they are diachronically fairly stable, as suggested by the fact that in many cases they can be traced back etymologically to or even beyond the earliest stages of reconstructible language history. This is why so far not much progress has been made in unraveling the genesis of personal pronouns: the number of cases where it has been possible to determine their origin is severely limited. Still, some data do exist and allow for the reconstruction of some major lines of grammatical evolution. As we hope to show in this paper, this evolution is the product of a handful of crosslinguistically fairly uniform cognitive and communicative strategies.

Keywords

grammaticalizationidentifierpersonal pronounpluralizationshift in deixisspatial deixis
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2010 , pp. 117 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2010

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