The third person gap in adnominal pronoun constructions

Abstract

The lack of third person adnominal pronouns in English-type languages (They linguists) is argued to be an effect of contextually conditioned allomorphy between the exponents of the definite article and third person pronouns within a pronominal determiner structure. A crosslinguistic survey of 82 languages finds that the third person gap is crosslinguistically relatively rare and may be restricted to Europe and surrounding areas. The survey also suggests a potential interaction between the third person gap and the availability of distinct articles, as expected on the proposed analysis. The paper also discusses issues raised by the third person gap for alternative analyses, including those advocating an NP-analysis.