Special Dependent Personal Pronouns (Feature 17)

From Apics

Feature Annotation

Many languages have a set (or several sets) of personal pronouns that are dependent (generally on a verb) in that they cannot occur without their host word, e.g. in elliptical answers (’Who did it? He!’). Dependent pronouns contrast with independent personal pronouns, i.e. pronouns that can be used in elliptical answers. All languages have independent personal pronouns, but not all have dependent pronouns. If your language has only independent pronouns, choose value 1.
Dependent pronouns may often cooccur with coreferential NPs or independent pronouns to various extents, and there is often a debate over whether they are “agreement markers”, “cross-reference markers” or “pronominal arguments”. These issues are irrelevant here -- any set of markers with person information counts as “personal pronouns” for this feature (including e.g. the set of Latin subject agreement markers -o, -s, t, -mus, -tis, -nt).
Dependent pronouns are often clitics or affixes, but need not be – the decisive criterion is lack of independent occurrence, and contrast with a set of independent pronouns.
Only subject pronouns and (direct)object pronouns are taken into account here (possessive pronouns and pronouns in oblique positions are not considered).
In many languages, the pronominal paradigms are only partially differentiated, and for some person-number values the dependent and independent forms coincide. In such cases, please choose one of the differentiating values (unless the differentiation is really marginal).

Additional remarks

The criterion of elliptical answers that is given here as a sufficient criterion for classifying a pronoun as an independent pronoun is not the best criterion, because in some languages independent personal pronouns are not really felicitous in elliptical answers. While question-answer sequences such as English "Who did it? He" and French "Qui est arrivé hier? Lui" are not impossible, it seems that answers with an additional verb ("He did", "C'est lui", or similar) are more natural in English and French. However, everyone agrees that English "he" and French "lui" are independent personal pronouns. Thus, the criterion should be formulated in weaker terms: If a personal pronoun can be focused, it is an independent personal pronoun. If it cannot be focused, it is not an independent personal pronoun. Occurrence in an elliptical verbless answer is one focus context, but other focus contexts are contrastive situations of various sorts (e.g. "I will go, not you"), and occurrence in clefts ("It's you who will go").

Values

Value		Value Annotation
1	No dependent pronouns exist	E.g. Bislama, Ternate Chabacano; Standard English is also in this category, as the sole person-number marker -s is quite isolated in the system and in this sense marginal.
2	Dependent subject pronouns exist (but not object pronouns)	Seychelles Creole mon pe vini ‘I’m coming’ vs. independent mwan ‘I’
3	Dependent object pronouns exist (but not subject pronouns)	Rare, e.g. Karo
4	Dependent subject and object pronouns exist	E.g. Cape Verdean Creole ami (1sg independent) vs. N (1sg dependent subject pronouns) and -m(1sg dependent object pronoun)
5	Other	(Please give details in the “General comments” field.)

WALS No.

(None)