The effects of pluralisation on personal pronoun referentiality Event as iCalendar

(School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics)

20 March 2019

12 - 1pm

Venue: Pat Hanan Room

Location: Te Puna Reo / Cultures, Languages and Linguistics Building (207-501)

Associate Professor Eduardo Piñeros | University of Auckland

This study draws on the Spanish pronominal system to shed light on the relationship between the grammatical categories of personal and number. It has been observed that, as happens in many other languages, pluralisation affects the referentiality of Spanish personal pronouns. For instance, while singular yo 'I' refers exclusively to the 'first person', plural nosotros 'we' is amenable to multiple readings: 'choral we', 'inclusive we', 'exclusive we', and 'universal we'. The ambiguity affecting plural personal pronouns has led to the claim that number does not contribute to the structure of person paradigms, which entails that nosotros would not be the plural counterpart of yo.

This presentation demonstrates that such a view creates more problems than it solves and puts forth a new analysis, which reveals that the gray area between person and number is the domain of a third grammatical category: clusivity.