Noun classes and pronouns Summary
A speaker chooses the appropriate pronominal form in a given context based on an interesting variety of factors. Features of person, number, and gender are determined by the intended reference (whether anaphoric or deictic). The pronoun may be inflected for case on the basis of its syntactic position. And the speech situation may also be relevant, if the language uses pronouns to encode features such as politeness and proximity.
In describing the pronouns of a given language, the first step is to define the parameters of the system: how many categories of person, number, and (perhaps) gender are distinguished? These parameters define the number of possible forms. The second step is to determine the inventory, i.e. the forms which actually occur in the language. In the systems charted in (16–18), the number of actual forms is equal to the number of possible forms; the only gaps in these charts correspond to the logically impossible “1st singular inclusive” category. But this will not always be the case. For example, look at the nominative case set for Kimaragang in (19). We can see that Kimaragang uses the same parameters as the Samoan system in (17); but there are fewer distinct forms in the Kimaragang nominative set, because only one dual form is attested. In other words, there are systematic gaps in the Kimaragang paradigm. (Can you identify these gaps?)
Pronoun systems around the world tend to fall into familiar patterns, and to vary in familiar ways. For example, we have said that gaps in the pronoun inventory are more likely to occur in the third person than in the first or second person. However, any particular language may surprise us. Standard Arabic, for example, has distinct dual forms in the second and third persons, but not in the first person. Moreover, it is important to check whether apparent gaps in the inventory are systematic (i.e. truly a feature of the language) or just an accident due to insufficient data. Even in a fairly large corpus of data, it is quite easy for one or two pronoun forms to be unattested, and eliciting the missing forms from a native speaker can sometimes be surprisingly difficult.
