What a personal pronoun can do for you: The case of a southern Dutch dialect

Abstract

This paper presents a functional analysis of the grammatical system of subject pronouns in a southern Dutch dialect (spoken in Antwerp, Belgium), aiming to illustrate how the high ‘pragmatic value’ of personal pronouns in a language may trigger considerable structural and functional sophistication in them. The dialect under consideration features a very complex set of subject pronouns, with 33 different forms including derived and reduplicated ones, as well as a system for syntactic pronoun doubling according to a number of fixed combinatorial patterns. Alternative forms and combinations turn out to serve a number of quite different interactive roles pertaining to different aspects of the special position of pronominal referents in conversation, with the two major functional dimensions determining pronominal choice being the coding of the informational salience of the referent on the one hand, and the expression of the speaker’s personal feelings and attitudes (positive as well as negative) regarding the interlocutor or the pronominal referent on the other hand.