To Martha and all,
I don't mind saying that words like "my, their" have a pronominal
function -- that is, they point to an antecedent. But I want to
reserve the word "pronoun" for true nominals. These words are
determiners, not nominals. There are many pro-forms in English; I'd
like to see grammar teaching include more of them ("such" is pro-
adjectival; "do" is pro-verbal -- or pro-predicative, really --
"there" and "then" are pro-adverbial, etc.)
I am a little leery of labeling headwords as missing in a sentence
like "Yours is better." I'm a very surface-y linguist; if it's not
there, it's not missing. A case like this example is not like
ellipsis -- one couldn't put in the headword and have a grammatical
sentence ("Yours drill is better").
As to Latin, well, I don't want to get into a deep discussion of
genitive, which I am not quite equipped to do anyway. English grammar
is dramatically different from Latin. I have no idea how to classify
Latin parts of speech. I've never studied the language and know
little about it linguistically speaking.
However one decides to label things, it is very important to point
out that the "my, her" series is not nominal, as what I am calling
"true" pronouns are. As to "my sister's cat" > "her cat", the "her"
neatly covers both the reference to "my sister" (the pronominal-
function part) and the possessive determiner aspect of the -'s. Since
"my sister's" is marked possessive, it's not a nominal. (I know,
someone is now going to ask about "My sister's (power drill) is
better." I'd call that ellipsis. I hope there is some kind of
reliable linguistic test for distinguishing ellipsis from cases like
"mine is better", but I sure can't come up with one right now.)
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Dept.
Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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