Linguistische Berichte Heft 196

This paper deals with personal pronouns as determiners in English and German. Its aim is to explain the fact that third person personal pronouns cannot be used as transitive determiners although first and second person pronouns can. The explanation is based on a revised view of person deixis developed from the claim made by Lyons (1968) and Schmid (1970/1983) that not only personal pronouns but also demonstrative pronouns belong to the inventory of person deixis.

In the first part, the often illogical occurrence of linking elements homonymous with plural markers is explained by showing that the former do not originate in the latter but that both have been grammaticalized in parallel pathways from stem building suffixes. In the second part, the (non)application ofthe linking elements -n and -s will be explained by analysing the form of the first constituents as well as the function of the linking elements. The results are relevant for linguistic theory and for acquisition theory since they call into doubt the Level Ordering Model of the lexicon.

We show that reduced personal argument pronouns in Dutch and Gerrnan surface in a proper subset of the positions accessible to füll argument DPs. Therefore, we argue for a unified syntactic analysis, which takes both types of DPs to be subject to the same phrase structural principles and the same positioning rules, namely, XP-scrambling and XP-'topicalization'. Our argument here rests a.o.t. on the observation that the case for a subject-/nonsubject-asymmetry w.r.t. fronting into Spec,CP has been overstated. Instead we diagnose what we call 'Conditional Syrnmetry'. We thus suggest that a more insightful account can be developed if Dutch and Gerrnan possess exactly one target-position for fronted XPs. We further argue that degrees of constituent perrnutability and frontability should be derived under a multifactorial account, drawing on independently motivated principles from the syntax-discourse interface and (morpho-) phonology as they interact with the system of pronouns. lt follows that, as far as syntax goes, reduced pronouns in Dutch and Gerrnan must not be treated as 'special clitics'. Neither should they be analyzed as bare X 0 -categories. Thus, no syntactic argument for the existence or directional orientation offunctional heads can be based on these elements.