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Janez Oresnik

Natural Syntax: the grammatical person of personal pronouns

Keywords: Natural Syntax, personal pronouns, the first person, the second person, the third person

Natural Syntax is a developing deductive theory, a branch of Naturalness Theory. The naturalness judgements are couched in naturalness scales, which follow from the basic parameters (or “axioms”) listed at the beginning of the paper. The predictions of the theory are calculated in the deductions, whose chief components are a pair of naturalness scales and the rules governing the alignment of corresponding naturalness values. Parallel and chiastic alignments are distinguished, in complementary distribution. Chiastic alignment is mandatory in derivations limited to unnatural environments.
The paper deals with the grammatical person of personal pronouns. The basic naturalness scale is >nat (1st, 2nd, 3rd) / grammatical person. Parallel alignment is used, except when the language data are restricted to the 3rd person, which demarcates an ex-tremely unnatural environment and thus requires chiastic alignment.

STUF – Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Akademie Verlag

Print ISSN: 0942-2919
Volume: 60, 04/2007
Pages: 293 - 313

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