Non-prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns in Chinese

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-18.2018.190How to use a DOI?

Keywords

non-prototypical use; personal pronoun; reference; grammaticalization

Abstract

Helmbrecht (2015) presents an interesting typological study on the non-prototypical uses of personal pronouns, demonstrating that the form-meaning mismatch involving personal pronouns is essentially discourse-based, in the sense that the referents of personal pronouns dynamically vary with a particular context, and hence some kind of additional pragmatic meaning tends to be encoded into them. Based on his study, Helmbrecht proposes two hypotheses about how the phenomena at issue could be grammaticalized: (i) Plural pronouns may shift to singular ones; (ii) third-person pronouns may shift to second- or first-person ones, but not vice versa. From a more extensive typological perspective, we present in this article some Mandarin Chinese patterns to complement his generalization of personal pronouns.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tunan Hu
PY  - 2018/07
DA  - 2018/07
TI  - Non-prototypical Uses of Personal Pronouns in Chinese
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 840
EP  - 843
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-18.2018.190
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-18.2018.190
ID  - Hu2018/07
ER  -