Toward a Four-way Pronoun Hierarchy: A View from Slavic

Abstract

This paper examines how grammatical categories are structured in classes with different degrees of syntactic deficiency, paying special attention to pronouns. We take Cardinaletti & Starke’s (1999) tripartite classification of pronouns as a starting point of our discussion and show that their three-way distinction is not sufficient to fully capture the phenomenon, based on old and modern Slavic data. We also demonstrate that their “Minimize Structure” principle is challenged by diachronic data from Slavic.