Pronouns--Grammar and Representation (review)

As explained in the preface, this volume contains selected papers from a special workshop at the 2000 Annual Conference of the German Society for Linguistics. Like many workshop proceedings, the collection covers a wide diversity of topics, but the editors have included a thorough introductory chapter and have obviously worked to show the relations among the papers. The papers of the volume touch on paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties. They focus on problems of representing the interpretation and syntactic characteristics of pronouns as well as on explanations of various less-known phenomena. The last two papers, written by Maria Mercedes Piñango and Esterella de Roo, are concerned with psycholinguistic reflections of the mechanisms governing pronominal behavior.

The diversity of topics is matched by the diversity of data. Several contributors incorporate materials from different languages. This is prominent not only in papers devoted to principles governing the structures of pronominal paradigms (Heidi Harley and Elizabeth Ritter, Michael Cysouw, Helmut Weiss) but also in discussions of the semantic and syntactic representation of pronominal phrases in the papers by Ruth Kempson and Wilfried Meyer Viol and by Phoevos Panagiotidis. Several papers deal with pronominal distribution (either semantic—sometimes based also on sociolinguistic factors—or syntactic) in concrete languages such as Sinhala (Neelakshi Chandrasena Premawardhena), Qumran Hebrew (Jacobus A. Naudé), and German (Gereon Müller).

The papers in the volume present quite a number of intriguing theoretically oriented hypotheses that may well serve as a basis for further debate. Thus, the appeal to dynamic approaches to discourse in Kempson and Meyer-Viol’s paper and the appeal to the partly discourse-related notion of salience in Klaus von Heusinger’s paper are designed to make the representation of pronominal interpretation more economical. The extensive use of hierarchies and defaults as well as the optimality-theoretic model (Müller) permits the formulation and substantiation of certain nontrivial correlations between various facts of semantics, morphosyntax, and their interface, such as those between the degree of bondedness of a pronominal series and the richness of their paradigms (Cysouw). At the same time, some well-established conceptions turn out to be disputed: for example, Panagiotidis argues against the treatment of pronouns as intransitive determiners and provides evidence from languages with two different types of pronouns.

To conclude, it is hoped that this volume may serve as a basis not only for further understanding of how pronouns work and how their systems are arranged but also for more fundamental typological and theoretical observations.