Disassembling and Reassembling Pronouns

A case study of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian

Abstract

This paper explores the building blocks of personal pronouns in order to provide a unified model of the form, locus and function of phi- and case features of pronouns that will account for their morphological distinctions and agreement properties. The proposal bears on the notion of hierarchy within the syntactic projections in the nominal domain, such that the base (nP) is dominated by phi-features (in the order: Person > Number > Gender), which are in turn dominated by case. The structure of pronouns proposed in this paper is shown to have consequences for pronominal morphology: 3rd-person pronouns resemble nouns in that both consist of an nP base, dominated by number-, gender- and case-bearing functional heads. First- and second-person pronouns on the other hand, are also based on an nP, but instead of grammatical gender, they encode person above the nP. Both types of pronouns differ from nouns in lacking a lexical root (Moskal 2015b; Smith et al. 2018). The proposal for their morphological realisation will account for various types of suppletion found in their paradigms and offer an argument in favour of dynamic determination of cyclic domains.