2.1 Analysing English adnominal pronouns

A central point of contention for the analysis of English-type APCs has been the relationship between the pronoun and the noun, or the remainder of the noun phrase. One strand of analyses suggests that the pronoun and the noun form two distinct nominal phrases in an appositive structure (Delorme & Dougherty 1972; Olsen 1991; Cardinaletti 1994; Willim 2000; Rutkowski 2002; Ackema & Neeleman 2013; 2018). Since this type of approach makes no claims about the category of the phrases in apposition, nor about a direct relationship between pronouns and articles, the DP/NP debate is tangential on this view. An appositive analysis of APCs may view them as a complex DP involving a pronominal DP with an appositive phrase (either a DP or a smaller projection) containing the noun as sketched by Roehrs (2005: 252, (3a)) reproduced in (7), but it could also be framed in terms of apposition of two NPs (8), cf. Delorme & Dougherty (1972).

(7)

(8)

The major alternative is the pronominal determiner analysis (PDA) based on Postal (1969). On this view, APCs structurally parallel definite expressions like the linguists, so adnominal pronouns are essentially articles. A central argument for the PDA, reflected by its name, is the complementary distribution of definite articles and adnominal pronouns already illustrated in (3) for English and in (9) for German.

Since Abney’s (1987) reanalysis of Postal’s proposal in terms of the DP-hypothesis, all PDA-based approaches to adnominal pronouns I am aware of follow suit in treating the pronoun as head of the construction (Lawrenz 1993; Longobardi 1994; 2008; Lyons 1999; Panagiotidis 2002; Rauh 2003; 2004; Roehrs 2005; Saab 2007; 2013; Bernstein 2008b; Höhn 2016), as sketched in (10) leaving aside other possible functional projections.

A final set of approaches assumes that the pronoun in APCs occupies a specifier position (e.g. Spec,DP), often moved there after first establishing a predication relation with the noun lower in the structure. These approaches are relatively heterogeneous in their specifics, but it is worth noting that those I am aware of are (mainly) based on Japanese (Noguchi 1997; Furuya 2008; Inokuma 2009) or Greek (Panagiotidis & Marinis 2011; Choi 2014a; b), although at least Choi (2014a; b) proposes to also extend his analysis to English. I will return to this class of analyses in Section 2.3 and focus for now on reasons for considering the pronoun to be the head of an English-type APCs and against assuming an appositive analysis.

A first argument that APCs are headed by the pronoun determining grammatical properties of the overall phrase, particularly its grammatical person, is based on Lyons (1999: 312f.) and Radford (2009: 109). Reflexives generally agree in person with their antecedent. In (11a) the person of the nominal expression, requiring the use of the second person reflexive, is not determined by the noun lecturers, which is identical across all examples. Instead, the second person property of the nominal phrase stems from the second person plural pronoun you. Determining the grammatical properties of a constituent is typically what is expected of a head.

A similar argument can be made based on verbal agreement in German. The noun Linguisten ‘linguists’ is constant across the German data in (12). The agreement marking on the verb is therefore unlikely to be sensitive to a property of the noun in the APC in (12a), but rather to the person specification encoded by the pronoun. In this respect, then, the pronoun determines the (relevant) grammatical properties of the whole phrase.

A potential challenge for this view comes from so-called unagreement (e.g. Hurtado 1985; Ackema & Neeleman 2013; 2018; Choi 2013; 2014a; Höhn 2016). In languages like Spanish or Modern Greek definite plural noun phrases can co-occur with non-third person verbal marking, cf. (13).

This may seem to suggest that a pronoun is not necessarily involved in triggering agreement after all. Indeed, Ackema & Neeleman (2013; 2018) argue for a symmetric account of agreement based on unagreement. Simplifying a lot, they propose that the person features of the verb are transferred to R-expression subjects through a combination of processes of Feature Spreading and Dissociation. I won’t discuss their analysis in detail (but see Section 2.3), but it is worth noting that Ackema & Neeleman are compelled to assume an appositive analysis of APCs (Ackema & Neeleman 2018: 294f.). So even an alternative view on the agreement mechanism underlying data like (13) has (so far) not led to a noun-headed version of the PDA, but to appositive analyses. The next subsection provides some arguments for the PDA over an appositive analysis of English-style APCs.

2.2 Some arguments against appositive analyses

Pesetsky (1978), Lawrenz (1993: Chapter 6), Roehrs (2005) and Höhn (2016) provide a range of arguments against analysing APCs in languages like English or German as instances of apposition. I present a selection here.

A distinction is often made between loose and close apposition, the most salient difference being that the latter “occur within a single prosodic unit, whereas loose appositives involve an intonational break between the two subparts” (Lekakou & Szendrői 2012: 111, fn. 6).¹ This provides an initial argument against analysing English-style APCs as loose apposition, since they do not normally display such an intonational break. Furthermore, Pesetsky (1978: 355, (17)) notes that the exceptional use of us in subject positions noted for APCs in (4a) is not possible with apposition, cf. (14).²

Drawing on Höhn (2016: 563, (45)), example (15a) shows that quantified expressions can be used in loose apposition to pronouns, while being ruled out with APCs (15b) and a definite article (15c).

Lawrenz (1993: 90) argues that coordinated noun phrases in German can only occur in APCs when a definite article could appear instead of the pronoun, while appositions display no such restrictions. Although I think her argument is correct, additional clarification is required for its application to German and English. In both languages, coordinated plural noun phrases are unproblematic with apposition (16/17a), APCs (16/17b) and definite expressions (16/17c). Coordinate structures consisting of two singular noun phrases referring to individuals can occur in loose apposition to a plural pronoun (16/17d), but not in an APC (16/17e).

Extending Lawrenz’ original argument to English is complicated by the fact that a definite counterpart to (17e) is grammatical after all, cf. (17f). This phrase is ambiguous between what Heycock & Zamparelli (2005) call a joint reading, referring to a single individual who is both a father and a son, and a split reading, referring to a non-singleton set of a father and his son. German lacks a singular split reading (Heycock & Zamparelli 2005), but (18) is a (well-formed, pace Lawrenz 1993) joint reading counterpart to (17f) with a singular determiner instead of the plural form from (16f). To rescue Lawrenz’ generalisation, one needs to understand why English (17e) cannot have a split or joint reading and why the grammaticality of German (18) does not imply the grammaticality of the APC in (16e).

The split reading of (17f) is (partly) dependent on the lack of number on the (Heycock & Zamparelli 2005). A split reading of (17e) is probably ruled out because plural determiners in English require formal number agreement with a plural nominal expression (the [+PLUR] feature of Heycock & Zamparelli 2005) and a coordinate structure of two singular nouns is not formally plural marked. Thus, *we father and son is out for the same reasons as *these/those father and son and the German examples in (16ef).

A joint reading is ruled out for both (16e) and (17e) by the fact that the pronoun is semantically plural, while the joint coordination would have a singular referent.³ However, as a joint reading would be notionally and grammatically singular, it might be expected to be available with a singular pronominal determiner. In English, this is ungrammatical (*I father and son) for the same reasons that generally exclude argumental singular APCs (*I/you student).⁴ German (18), however, has a singular APC counterpart (19a) with a joint reading only. The lack of a split reading for this construction with APCs or plain articles is illustrated in (19bc), where identity of the referents of the coordinated nouns leads to infelicity or ungrammaticality.

While the data in (16/17) serve to distinguish APCs from loose apposition, the data in (18) and (19) illustrate Lawrenz’ general proposal that coordinated noun phrases can only occur in an APC if a definite article could be used instead. The apparent counterexample in (17f) is due to the availability of split readings with non-plural marked determiners discussed by Heycock & Zamparelli (2005) and does not carry over to the (plural marked) pronominal determiner in (17e).

I now turn to some arguments against treating APCs as instances of close apposition. Classically, close appositions are taken to contain a proper name (Burton-roberts 1975: 397), clearly not a requirement in APCs. Lekakou & Szendrői (2012) do not assume this strong restriction for their analysis of Greek constructions involving two coreferential nominal expressions, cf. also Stavrou (1995), but agree that the order of close apposition is reversible (see also Burton-Roberts 1975: 402 and Payne & Huddleston 2002: 447). In these constructions, agreement is with either part of the apposition (20ab). Importantly, Lekakou & Szendrői (2012) also note that this is not the case for Greek APCs (20c), where person agreement is fixed and the pronoun obligatorily comes first (see also Section 2.3). This observation also holds for English, cf. the ungrammaticality of *academics we.

The argumentation against a loose appositive analysis from (17) can be adapted to close apposition as well. Two coordinated proper names can serve as close apposition (21a). If APCs were simply close apposition, replacing the anchor the siblings with a plural pronoun should yield a grammatical APC, contrary to fact (21b). On the other hand, replacing only the definite article with a pronoun as in (21c) leads to a well-formed APC, as expected if English adnominal pronouns are pronominal determiners.

Roehrs (2005) provides another argument against assimilating APCs to close apposition in German. APCs can contain adjectival modifiers (22a), whereas the second part of an apposition cannot be modified, cf. (22b). Höhn (2016: 563) notes that this reasoning also applies to English, cf. (23a) vs. (23bc).

These observations support the view that APCs should not be analysed as loose or close apposition in languages like English and German.

2.3 Variation in APCs

This section addresses selected aspects of crosslinguistic variation in the structure of APCs (for a wider overview see Pesetsky 1978; Choi 2013; 2014a; Louagie & Verstraete 2015; Höhn 2016; 2017). One point of variation mentioned earlier are number restrictions. English APC arguments are restricted to the plural, cf. *I academic/idiot missed the deadline, while German permits them in the singular as well (24).

Allowing both singular and plural APCs may be crosslinguistically more common than ruling out singular APCs (Höhn 2017: Chapter 2), but ruling out plural APCs is (almost) unattested, suggesting that the plural version is the least marked. Rauh’s (2004) pragmatically based explanation for the markedness difference between singular and plural APCs in German may offer a rationale for the crosslinguistic markedness of singular APCs. However, I am not aware of any account capable of predicting whether a particular language displays a number restriction on APCs. I am going to focus on plural APCs as the least marked option here.

Another type of variation concerns the occurrence of articles in APCs. In line with the PDA, English-type APCs exclude the article. As seen in (25), Italian also behaves like English, but Spanish and Greek (along with other languages) actually require an article in APCs.

Choi (2013; 2014a) and Höhn (2016) link the obligatory presence of the article in APCs (and the availability of pro-drop) to the unagreement phenomenon mentioned above for Spanish (13) and illustrated for Greek in (26a). The presence of the pronoun emis ‘we’ yields an APC, while its absence leads to an unagreement configuration with a definite R-expression subject and non-third person verbal agreement. In Italian, the unagreement configuration is ungrammatical and an APC must be used instead (26b).

Choi (2013; 2014a; b) rejects the PDA and proposes that adnominal pronouns (and demonstratives) are base-generated in the specifier of a deixis-related head and move to Spec,DP as in (27) not only in Greek-type languages, but also in English.⁶ On this view, the crucial difference between English/Italian- and Greek-type languages is the overtness of D, with an overt D head required as intermediate licenser for pro-drop in an APC.

(27)	after Choi (2014a: 141, (3))

Höhn (2016) retains the PDA for languages like English, but argues that in languages like Greek and Spanish person (and demonstrative) features are hosted on a separate head from definiteness (28). Person is encoded by the features [±AUTH(or)] and [±PART(icipant)] (Nevins 2007; 2011), with [+AUTH, +PART] corresponding to the traditional first person, [–AUTH, +PART] to second and [–AUTH, –PART] to third person. Unagreement results from null-spellout of non-demonstrative ([–DEM]) Pers heads, whereas [+DEM] Pers heads are realised as adnominal pronouns.

(28)	simplified after Höhn (2016: 572, (72))

The approaches crucially differ on whether English- and Greek-type languages have uniform APC structures. Höhn, Silvestri & Squillaci (2016; 2017) argue that unagreement configurations with quantified subjects support Höhn’s (2016) proposal that there is a structural contrast in the location of person. Languages with “plain” unagreement typically also allow unagreeing quantified subjects (Ackema & Neeleman 2013; 2018; Höhn 2016), see (29a), while languages without “plain” unagreement do not (29b).

If the availability of unagreement in null subject languages was determined only by the overtness of the D head in (27), both sentences in (29) should be equally ungrammatical given the absence of a D head. The structure in (28) decouples person features from the definite article, suggesting that a (non-demonstrative, hence silent) Pers head could also occur in constructions without an (overt) article like (29a). Moreover, if the PDA holds for Italian, the ungrammaticality of (29b) results from the assumption that the quantified construction does not contain a definite D head. I conclude that Greek-type APCs differ structurally from the English/Italian type, pace Choi (2014a; b). While the PDA does not apply to Greek, this does not represent an argument against adopting it for English-type languages.

As noted above, several analyses of Japanese also reject the PDA (Furuya 2008; Noguchi 1997; Inokuma 2009). Since Japanese is strictly head-final, a pronominal determiner would be expected to occur postnominally on the PDA contrary to fact, cf. (30a). The adnominal pronoun is argued to occupy a specifier position instead as, e.g., in (30b). Importantly, even if some languages call for a specifier-based analysis of APCs, this does not raise problems for the PDA for languages like English.

Further sources of APCs may exist. Adjunction, for instance, could be involved in languages like Imonda, reported to allow adnominal pronouns either preceding or following the noun (Seiler 1985: 61). Such a flexible distribution would be unusual for an article-like element, both typologically (Himmelmann 2001: 832) and from the perspective of a DP analysis.

3.1 Accounting for the third person gap

Delorme & Dougherty (1972: 10, fn. 5) claim that neither their appositive analysis nor Postal’s (1969) precursor to the PDA account for the “peculiarity of the third person forms.” However, current versions of the PDA adopting the DP hypothesis can capture this pattern by assuming that adnominal pronouns and definite articles occupy the same syntactic position, leading to the hypothesis that the definite article and third person pronouns are essentially allomorphs (Postal 1969: 217; Lyons 1999: 315; Roehrs 2005; Bernstein 2008b; cf. also Sommerstein 1972, Luján 2000; 2002 and Rauh 2003). I propose a more concrete implementation below.

On the other hand, I am not aware of proposals in the literature providing an explanation for the data in (31)–(34) above based on an appositive analysis of English-style APCs. One might stipulate a parameterised rule against apposition to third person pronouns, but a simplistic implementation of this (strawman) approach runs into problems with the fact that apposition to third person pronouns is actually possible, cf. (35) inspired by Pesetsky (1978: 355, (17)).

Example (35a) involves loose apposition, of course, so one could instead propose a restriction against close apposition to third person pronouns. The motivation for such a rule would remain mysterious, however, considering that close apposition regularly involves two expressions typically characterised as third person without problems, e.g. Bob the builder. So I suggest that difficulties with accounting for the third person gap may be added to the list of challenges for an apposition-based account of English-type APCs.

Analysing adnominal pronouns as specifiers raises similar issues, as there is no obvious reason why third person pronouns should not be able to occur in a specifier position that can host first and second person pronouns. This actually makes the right predictions if Japanese adnominal pronouns are specifiers (see Section 2.3), since Japanese has no third person gap (36). This contrast with English finds a natural explanation if English APCs are pronominal determiners, whereas it would require further elaboration if both types of languages involved the same APC structure.

Déchaine & Wiltschko (2002: 421f.) adopt the PDA for first and second person, but not the intuition that definite articles and third person pronouns are competing for the same syntactic position. Instead, following Cardinaletti & Starke (1999) they propose that the lack of third person APCs in English (and presumably other languages) is due to a structural difference between first/second person pronouns, which involve a DP (37a), and third person pronouns, which only project up to a smaller φP (37b). However, it remains unclear why φ in (37b) cannot take an overt noun as complement (Asbury 2008: 141f.; see also Rauh 2003: 413, fn. 32 for criticism), so this account does not offer a solution to the question at hand.

(37)	a.
	b.

Before presenting my proposal, I want to point out the role of demonstrativity in APCs and the feature setup of D. Abney (1987: 179) suggests that third person APCs are excluded “due to demonstratives being suppletive in the paradigm.” Discussing Postal’s (1969) example in (38a), Sommerstein (1972) advances a similar argument, observing that the appropriate third person “counterpart” of the adnominal pronoun is a demonstrative (38b).

Lyons (1999) and Rauh (2003) propose that pronominal determiners encode not only definiteness but also demonstrative properties (see also Choi 2014a and Höhn 2016), so the string we women can be the first person counterpart of both the women and these/those women. Following them, I posit both [±DEF] and [±DEM] features on D in English-type languages.⁷

3.2 Edge-sensitive allomorphy

I now turn to my proposal of how to capture the third person gap in English. Panagiotidis (2015) argues that functional heads need to be licensed as part of an extended projection (Grimshaw 2005). A nominal phrase is an extended nominal projection (xnP) projected by a little n head carrying a categorial feature [N], which provides an interpretive perspective to categoryless roots, enabling them to enter into syntactic structures (Acquaviva 2009; Panagiotidis 2011; 2015). Functional heads within an xnP carry an uninterpretable [uN] feature that they need to check under agreement with an interpretable [N] feature located on little n. Consequently, there are no intransitive determiners, since “plain” pronouns also contain an empty noun at their core (Panagiotidis 2002). This is problematic for an account of the third person gap that frames the distribution of definite articles and third person pronouns in terms of transitivity.

To account for the third person gap without a syntactic transitivity distinction between third person pronouns and articles, I propose an analysis in terms of contextually conditioned allomorphy within the non-lexicalist, realisational framework of Distributed Morphology, cf. Halle & Marantz (1993) and much subsequent work. This means that syntax generates featurally fully specified structures without phonological content. Vocabulary Items (VIs) represent mappings from feature sets to phonological exponents and they are inserted postsyntactically by a process of Vocabulary Insertion when the structure has been shipped to the PF interface. They can be underspecified for features on the syntactic node they realise, meaning that multiple VIs may compete for insertion into the same terminal node. In this case, following the Subset Principle (Halle 1997) the most specific VI wins, i.e. the one matching the features of the syntactic node most closely. VIs may also specify restrictions on their local insertion context, which I assume to contribute to a VI’s specificity according to the Subset Principle.⁸

I adopt Embick’s (2010) ℂ₁-LIN model, particularly the view that the local domain in which the contextual restrictions for VIs are evaluated is structurally and linearly determined. Hence, the triggering property has to be present inside the same spell-out domain and on a linearly adjacent node, with nodes receiving null spell-out not counting for adjacency. Spell-out domains are determined by cyclic heads (see also Bobaljik 2000; 2012; Embick & Marantz 2008; Marantz 2009), parallel to the concept of phases (Chomsky 2001). I assume that D and n are cyclic heads, so that DP represents a spell-out domain. VIs can require in their contextual restriction to be located at the edge of a spell-out domain.

The relevant parts of an xnP are sketched in (39). Number and gender features are valuated under agreement with lower heads in the xnP. For person, I employ the [±AUTH(or)] and [±PART(icipant)] features from Nevins (2007; 2011). A small set of relevant VIs is provided in (40). I only include the subject forms here and focus on the plural, as mentioned earlier.⁹

The VIs for the first and second person plural pronouns have no contextual restrictions, so they can realise a D head with appropriate feature specifications irrespective of whether or not NumP contains overt material. A plain pronoun results if there is no overt material in NumP, neither a nominalised root nor any adjectives. Overt material in NumP yields an APC.

The allomorphy between the definite article and the third person pronoun results from the interaction of the last two VIs. Even though in the implementation in (40) they and the do not include any person features, both will be able to realise D-heads specified syntactically for third person because the other VIs are all specified for [+PART] and do therefore not compete for exponence of a [–AUTH, –PART] node. While they is more specific than the, it also has a contextual restriction requiring that it be realised at the right edge of its spell-out domain (]_ɸ). The VI the represents the elsewhere case. When a definite D takes a phonologically empty NumP complement, there is no overt material intervening between D and the right edge of the spell-out domain, so the VI they wins. If any part of NumP gets an overt realisation, this intervenes between D and the right edge of the spell-out domain. Consequently, the contextual requirement for they is not fulfilled and the is inserted as the elsewhere case.

By underspecifying person on the VIs for they and the this implementation captures the often cited intuition that third person is a “non-person” (Benveniste 1971; Harley & Ritter 2002; Panagiotidis 2002) while retaining the idea that third person is syntactically specified (Nevins 2007; Harbour 2016). It may, alternatively, be possible to remove the need for a [±DEF] feature in the spirit of the proposal that definiteness and other effects can be captured through person features (Lyons 1999; Bernstein 2008b; Longobardi 2008; Richards 2008; Bárány 2017), replacing [+DEF] by [–PART] in (40). While the choice is not central here, this alternative option raises questions concerning the semantic contribution of the [–PART] feature, since definite expressions can in principle refer to sets containing a speech act participant as illustrated in (41).¹⁰

The approach sketched above carries over in principle to other languages with a pronominal determiner structure and a third person gap, but in German the so-called d-pronouns represent a potential objection (Wiltschko 1998; Elbourne 2005: 47). They are largely formally identical to the definite article, except for the genitive and the dative plural (Helbig & Buscha 2001: 229). In contrast to the English definite article, they occur without overt complements just like personal pronouns (42), apparently conflicting with the idea that complementary distribution of articles and third person pronouns accounts for the third person gap.

The explanation for this is that d-pronouns should be classified as demonstratives (Engel 1996; Diessel 1999; Helbig & Buscha 2001; Bosch, Rozario & Zhao 2003; Bosch, Katz & Umbach 2007). They are associated with topic shift (Diessel 1999: 96) or avoid discourse topics (Bosch & Umbach 2007) or the current perspectival centre (Hinterwimmer & Bosch 2016), while personal pronouns preferably refer to continuing topics as (43) shows (see also Himmelmann 1997; Hinterwimmer 2015; Bosch & Hinterwimmer 2016; cf. Comrie 2000 for similar Dutch data). On the most natural reading, the first sentence establishes the teachers as topic. A pronoun in the next sentence indicates continuing reference to them, while a d-pronoun induces topic shift, suggesting that the pupils were the ones who won.

The VI sie in (44) is restricted to realising non-demonstrative D heads, while die is underspecified for demonstrativity and has no contextual requirement. This accounts for the wide distribution of the latter as exponent of articles and d-pronouns/demonstratives, both with and without overt complements. For reasons of space, I leave further details for future work.

A reviewer raises another issue for German. The honorific singular/plural pronoun of address Sie can occur adnominally (45), although it is formally identical to the third person plural pronoun (in singular and plural usage).

This looks like an APC with a third person pronoun, contrary to the proposed complementary distribution between “intransitive” third person pronouns and “transitive” definite articles. Simon (2007) argues that while German formal pronouns are historically derived from third person pronouns, they synchronically realise a grammatically active feature of “respect” or formality in German. This suggests that the subject in (45) is grammatically not specified for third person. Although formal pronouns are systematically syncretic with third person pronouns in standard varieties of German, they involve distinct VIs and only the one realising the third person pronoun displays the edge requirement discussed above.

The idea of distinct vocabulary items for honorifics is supported by Simon’s (2007) observation that Bavarian German restricts the syncretism of third person plural and honorific pronouns to clitic subject/nominative forms, with distinct realisations in other cases, cf. Eana vs. -s in (46).

3.3 Further considerations and predictions

The proposed analysis of the third person gap in languages like English and German relies on a particular syntactic configuration that encodes definiteness and person in the same position, the PDA, and competition between multiple morphological exponents of that position. This subsection discusses some consequences of the account in a crosslinguistic perspective.

On the present account, there is no conceptual or structural necessity for the third person gap. Even languages with an English-like pronominal determiner structure do not have to show the gap, as it is essentially a PF effect resulting from the competition of two distinct VIs for third person D heads. This suggests that there should be languages where third person pronouns and articles are not distinct and third person pronouns are freely used adnominally in a determiner position.

Palmer (2017) argues convincingly that the Oceanic language Hoava is such a case. The third person pronouns sa ‘3SG’ and ria ‘3PL’ can be used on their own, but also adnominally. This is illustrated for ria in (47), along with a first person APC. The adnominal pronouns are in complementary distribution with the ‘general’ (specific) article na and the personal articles e/eri, leading Palmer to propose a PDA as in (48).

(48)	Palmer (2017: 438, (71b))

The Creole language Ndyuka may represent another example, with the same morphemes (3SG a and 3PL den) being used as third person pronoun and definite article (Huttar & Huttar 1994). See (50) for a singular example.

A theoretical bias for the assumption that pronouns and articles must be distributionally distinct (see Palmer 2017 for detailed discussion of this issue for Hoava) may be one reason for why such syncretisms of articles and pronouns are sometimes analysed as homonymous markers of different categories rather than as pronominal determiners.

Many Australian languages also display third person adnominal pronouns, e.g. Kayardild (50), although there is likely variation concerning how grammaticalised these structures are (see Blake 2001; Stirling & Baker 2007; Stirling 2008 and especially Louagie & Verstraete 2015). Some might involve pronominal determiners, but presumably not all of them.

In languages like Kayardild, where “NPs lacking a determiner may be definite or indefinite” (Evans 1995: 239), third person APCs seem to “fix” a definite/familiar interpretation. This resembles Wiltschko’s (2008) observations for plural marking in Halkomelem, where unmarked nouns are number-neutral (rather than singular as in languages like English), but addition of the (optional) plural marker enforces a plural interpretation. She proposes that number-marking in Halkomelem is an adjoined modifier rather than a functional head as in English (see also Wiltschko 2014). A hypothesis worth exploring may be that APCs in languages with this “optional” definiteness-marking also involve adjoined modifiers. Alternatively, the pronouns might also occupy a specifier position as has been proposed for Japanese (Section 2.3), which also allows third person APCs as seen in (36).

The account in Section 3.2 makes no direct predictions for the third person gap in languages that do not involve the PDA, but there seems to be no a priori reason why they should display the restriction. If they did, it should be due to different reasons than those sketched for English. So for methodological reasons I deliberately start with the strongest possible working assumption that the PDA-based account above is the only source for the third person gap. There may well be additional sources, but this working assumption presents a systematic way of identifying how far the explanation proposed for English can be extended. Below, I briefly sketch the three hypotheses in (51)–(53) that arise from this assumption.

Before turning to an evaluation of these hypotheses against crosslinguistic data in the next section, I close this one by addressing a reviewer’s concern with Icelandic Pro[NP] constructions (Sigurðsson & Wood 2020) like (54).¹¹ They involve a plural pronoun accompanying a nominal expression (or annex). While in many languages with this sort of inclusory construction (Lichtenberk 2000) the annex is marked, e.g. by case or an adposition, there is no special marker in Icelandic Pro[NP]s. Do these constructions bear on the question whether Icelandic has a third person gap?

While Pro[NP] constructions look superficially similar to APCs, their interpretation clearly differs. The annex in (54) is interpreted as denoting a proper subset of the reference set of the pronoun, while the nominal part of APCs generally does not have a distinct denotation from the adnominal pronoun. Indeed, Sigurðsson & Wood (2020: 11–13) argue convincingly that Pro[NP] constructions are distinct from the APCs discussed here.¹² Note, for instance, that the nominal part of Icelandic APCs is not marked by the definite article (55a), while the annexes of the Pro[NP]s in (54) are definite. Moreover, while the annex does not need to match the number of the pronoun in Pro[NP]s (54a), APCs are more restrictive in this respect (55b).

The analysis of Pro[NP] proposed by Sigurðsson & Wood (2020) establishes the connection between the pronoun and the annex through a “lock” head ⁌, suggesting a structure like (56a). However, discussing the possible use of (preferably postnominal) demonstratives in the annex Sigurðsson & Wood (2020: 14) suggest “that the annex may be either a full DP or a smaller category”, so (56b) would be equally compatible with their model.

If the annex is a DP, it is expected to form a separate spell-out domain from the pronoun on current assumptions, so interactions of the sort discussed for English-type APCs above are excluded. Taking complete extended projections to be spell-out domains (den Dikken 2018: 55), this likely holds even if the the annex corresponds to a smaller structure, as long as it forms a distinct extended projection from the pronoun. Finally, the fact that the annex is typically marked by the definite article¹³ shows that in Pro[NP]s the pronoun and and the article of the annex do not compete. In conclusion, I do not think that Pro[NP]s bear on the validity of the above account for the third person gap in English-type APCs.

The question whether Icelandic APCs show a third person gap is complicated by the fact that the third person plural pronouns (þeir/þær/þau ‘they.M/F/N’) are homonymous with a (distal) demonstrative (Einarsson 1961: 70).¹⁴ However, adnominal uses of þeir/þær/þau appear to require the noun to be modified by a relative clause. Structures like (57a) without relative clause are reportedly marked, though not clearly ungrammatical. There are examples without an overt relative clause, cf. (57b), but even here the phrase reportedly retains a restrictive interpretation, possibly indicating the presence of an elided relative clause.

If þeir málfræðingar ‘those linguists’ or þær stelpur ‘those girls’ in (57) can be considered third person APCs, Icelandic does not have a third person gap and is unproblematic for the current account. However, the lack of the definite article in APCs would raise questions concerning the no competition hypothesis (52) above and the relative clause requirement would need to be explained independently. If, on the other hand, the relative clause requirement is taken to indicate that these constructions are not actually third person APCs, Icelandic would display a third person gap. It is unclear to me which option is more plausible at this point, but I briefly speculate on the second option, as it is relevant to the current discussion.

If Icelandic has a third person gap, it could be explained similarly to the English pattern as a result of competition between the VIs of the definite article and the third person pronoun. The simplest possibility is that the suffixal article is an exponent of the D head that is lowered to the noun postsyntactically (Embick & Noyer 2001). Alternatively, the Icelandic definite article has been argued to correspond to a lower n head (Julien 2005). This is equally compatible with the competition-based approach and the gap-article hypothesis (51), albeit with a twist, if Julien (2005: 57) is correct that “in Icelandic, n and D cannot both be spelled out.” First and second person plural pronominal determiners in D would suppress realisation of the definite article in n. The third person pronoun, however, could not be inserted as pronominal determiner due the right edge restriction described above for English, allowing the article to be overtly realised in Julien’s n.

Crucially, if (57ab) do not represent third person APCs, the third person pronouns and the homonymous demonstratives þeir/þær/þau need to be realised by (synchronically) distinct VIs. The VIs realising the demonstrative have to lack the right edge restriction of the third person pronoun VI, since the demonstratives can occur adnominally (57b). The relative clause requirement is plausibly a semantic (or syntactic) property of this type of demonstrative. The intuition that expressions like (57a) are deviant, but not entirely ungrammatical is then due to the general availability of the demonstrative VIs þeir/þær/þau in adnominal contexts and a difficulty in identifying the (implied) relative clause required by the demonstrative. The third person pronoun VI would not play any role here.

I leave the most appropriate analysis of the Icelandic data to future research and turn to the crosslinguistic survey in the next section.

4.1 Surveyed data

The survey reported here comprises 82 languages from 49 genera (see supplementary material). The data used are largely based on grammars and published research, in some cases on elicitation from native speakers by the author. The sample is a convenience sample insofar as it only includes languages where information on APCs was available.

The first property investigated is the availability of third person APCs (AVAILABILITY OF APC₃), split between languages allowing third person APCs (APC₃) and those displaying a third person gap (GAP₃). The second property under investigation is the availability of articles distinct from third person pronouns (DISTINCT ARTICLE), classifying languages as having articles distinct from third person pronouns (Artyes) or as lacking distinct articles (Artno). Recall that APC₃ languages where third person pronouns and definite articles are non-distinct (like Hoava) are in line with the PDA and in fact represent the most straightforward type of pronominal determiner. These languages are therefore classified as Art_no here to avoid interfering with the investigation of the gap-article hypothesis (51), i.e. whether GAP₃ implies the presence of an article.

A similar issue arises for the distinctness of demonstratives (DISTINCT DEM). In some languages they are used as third person pronouns (Dem = 3rd), while other languages have distinct third person pronouns (Dem ≠ 3rd). Since demonstratives are typically able to occur attributively as nominal modifiers, in Dem = 3rd languages any tentative third person APCs are formally identical to plain demonstrative-noun constructions. Consequently, it is unclear whether an apparent third person APC in such a language involves an adnominal pronoun or an attributive demonstrative. While attributive demonstratives in some of these languages might indeed be analysed as (a type of) third person APCs, I set them aside here in order to focus on the role of definite articles, but list them in (58) for reference.¹⁶

4.2 Results

Table 1 shows the distribution of the surveyed languages for the two main factors DISTINCT ARTICLE and AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ as well as DISTINCT DEM. Excluding the Dem = 3rd column leaves a total of 65 languages from 40 genera. For these, Figure 1 visualises the absolute and relative frequency of Art_yes languages as a dependent of APC₃.

Figure 1

Availability of distinct article by availability of third person APCs.

Considerably more languages in the sample display APC₃ than GAP₃, as expected on the gap markedness hypothesis (53). Among the GAP₃ languages, the majority have a distinct article in line with the gap-article hypothesis (51). Also, most Art_no languages allow third person APCs, in line with the no competition hypothesis (52). The applicability of the hypotheses will be discussed in more detail in Section 4.3. However, since the sample is not balanced, the overrepresentation of language families (particularly Indo-European ones) might influence the data.

In order to counteract this, I take into account LANGUAGE GENUS (Dryer 1989) as an additional factor. Table 2 provides a count of distinct genera for each cell. Note that the totals do not exactly add up, since languages of the same genus may be represented in more than one cell. The general tendencies of the raw data in Table 1 remain intact, but the relative rarity of the third person gap becomes even clearer here with 35 genera allowing third person APCs and the third person gap instantiated in merely 6 genera.

To further test whether there is a stable effect of the availability of third person APCs on the availability of articles (gap article hypothesis) in the present sample, a statistical analysis was conducted using R 4.0.0 (R Core Team 2020) with the IDE RStudio 1.2.5042 (Rstudio Team 2020), with DISTINCT ARTICLE modelled as dependent variable and AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ as predictor in a generalised linear mixed-effects model using the lme4 package (Bates et al. 2015). In order to alleviate the impact of overrepresented genera, LANGUAGE GENUS was modelled as random effect. The resulting model has a positive intercept of 1.35 (SE = 0.69), reflecting the fact that the sample contains slightly more Art_no languages, and a negative fixed effect of –3.75 (SE = 1.65) for AVAILABILITY OF APC₃, indicating that GAP₃ languages are likely to have a distinct article. Following the suggestion by Bates et al. (2015: 33f.), the statistical inference from the generalised mixed-effects model was estimated by means of a log-likelihood test comparing the model including the factor AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ as a fixed effect (Bayesian information criterion (BIC) = 81.69) to a model without fixed effects (BIC = 90.33). The difference between model deviances suggests that the fixed effect of AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ cannot be dropped without a significant loss of information, as the log-likelihood test results in a χ² value (difference between model deviances) corresponding to a significant p-value (χ² = 12.82, p < 0.01). The outcome of the model comparison is therefore consistent with the gap-article hypothesis (51) that the availability of third person APCs is a relevant predictor for the presence of a distinct article.

Figure 2 maps the Dem ≠ 3rd languages according to their status for AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ and DISTINCT ARTICLE. For better readability due to the high density of languages, languages of Papua-New Guinea and the Timor-Alor-Pantar area are mapped separately in Figure 3.¹⁷ The illustrated distribution raises the possibility that the third person gap may represent an areal feature. All languages displaying the third person gap in the present sample cluster in Europe and nearby, in an area that could be characterised as Standard Average European (Haspelmath 2001) plus Welsh and Semitic. The two counterexamples to the gap-article hypothesis appear to be spoken in the eastern periphery of this tentative area.

Figure 2

Geographical distribution of availability of distinct articles and third person APCs.

Figure 3

Distribution of availability of distinct articles and third person APCs, close-up of Papua-New Guinea and vicinity.

4.3 Discussion

The results above are largely in line with the three hypotheses from Section 3.3, as far as the overall patterns are concerned. The third person gap is clearly not universal and in fact seems to be considerably less common than the availability of third person APCs as stipulated by the gap markedness hypothesis (53). Most languages in the sample that lack distinct articles allow third person APCs, which is a corollary of the gap-article hypothesis (51) and the no competition hypothesis (52). Finally, the availability of third person APCs seems to be a relevant predictor for the availability of distinct articles, as suggested by the gap-article hypothesis. In this section, I discuss the languages making up each of the four possible combinations of AVAILABILITY OF APC₃ and DISTINCT ARTICLE, address some challenges for the current proposal and consider the significance of the data for the status of the PDA and other analyses.

4.3.2 Unexpected third person gaps

The languages in (65) are all in line with the basic prediction of the gap-article hypothesis (51) that languages with the third person gap should have distinct articles.

(65)	GAP3 and Artyes: Dutch, English, German, Italian, northern Calabrian, southern Calabrian, Welsh, Hungarian, Galician, Spanish, Bulgarian, Cairene Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Maltese

Dutch, English, German, Italian, Welsh, Hungarian and northern and southern Calabrian behave as expected under the PDA also beyond the lack of third person APCs, as they also rule out definite articles in APCs. Matters are more complicated in Bulgarian, Galician, Spanish and the three Semitic languages. In these languages, the definite article is not in complementary distribution with the pronoun in APCs. In Section 2.3, unagreement in Spanish was connected to the inapplicability of the PDA. Galician and Bulgarian also allow unagreement (Höhn 2016) and plausibly work similarly. However, the Semitic languages also require articles in APCs (66), but lack unagreement (Höhn 2016: 560, fn. 15).

1. (66)
1. a.

1. Cairene Egyptian Arabic (Gary & Gamal-Eldin 1982: 80, (533))
1. ʔintu
2. you.PL
1. ʔit-talamza
2. DET-students
1. tiħibbu
2. 2PL.like
1. ʔilliʕb.
2. playing
1. ‘You students like playing.’

1.  
1. b.

1. Maltese (Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander 1997: 202, (915))
1. Intom
2. you.PL
1. il-ħaddiema
2. DET-workers
1. għandkom
2. have-2PL
1. tingħaqdu.
2. unite-2PL
1. ‘You workmen should unite together.’

Following the discussion in Section 2.3, the lack of unagreement suggests that the Semitic APCs structure should actually involve pronominal determiners, in contrast to Bulgarian, Galician and Spanish. The unexpected lack of complementary distribution of definite article and adnominal pronouns can be explained if articles in these languages are a morphological reflex of definiteness features that are syntactically represented elsewhere in the nominal structure, potentially on D. This has effectively been proposed independently for definiteness spreading or polydefiniteness in these languages, where the definite affixal articles do not only mark the noun, but also any adjective modifying a definite noun phrase. Against this background, definiteness has been argued to be part of the set of φ-features at least in Arabic and Hebrew (Fassi-Fehri 1999; Danon 2001; Shlonsky 2004; Pereltsvaig 2006; Danon 2008). I assume that Maltese works comparably.

Effects of this sort have been analysed in Distributed Morphology as post-syntactic insertion of dissociated morphemes (Embick 1997; Harley & Noyer 1999; Embick & Noyer 2001) which “reflect certain syntactic properties (or configurations) but do not in any sense contribute these properties to syntax” (Embick & Noyer 2001: 558). A uniform analysis of adjectival and nominal definiteness marking in these languages could treat all articles as dissociated morphemes marking agreement with an abstract [+DEF] feature in D.¹⁹ The structure of an APC after insertion of the dissociated morpheme could then look like (67), abstracting away from possible roll-up movement (Shlonsky 2004; Pereltsvaig 2006). For illustration, I assume that the dissociated [+DEF] morpheme on nouns adjoins to n, following Embick & Noyer’s (2001, 583) proposal for the Swedish definite suffix. Alternatively, it may be adjoined to Num if nouns raise to Num in the relevant languages.

(67)	ʔintu ʔit-talamza ‘we students’

If this is on the right track, the Semitic languages only superficially contradict the gap-article hypothesis. They encode definiteness and person features on the same head as expected on the PDA and the third person gap can be explained essentially as in English. The main difference would be that the relevant allomorph blocking insertion of the third person pronoun is not the definite article, but a null morpheme realising a definite D head specified for [–PART], i.e. third person.

This approach does not transfer to unagreement languages like Bulgarian, Galician and Spanish with a structure like (68), see Section 2.3.

(68)	after Höhn (2016: 572, (72))

In some languages with unagreement, like the two Greek varieties in (58) above, demonstratives and third person pronouns are non-distinct, so the third person gap is no issue. This is easily captured in (68) through the association of the Pers head with demonstrative features (see also Choi 2014a). Adnominal demonstratives realise third person APCs in these languages, while the Pers head in non-demonstrative structures with third person features simply receives null spell-out, yielding a plain definite DP.

This cannot be the whole story for languages with dedicated third person pronouns like Bulgarian, Galician and Spanish. Considering that they do not involve a pronominal determiner structure and still disallow third person APCs, they represent a genuine counterexample to the working assumption from Section 3.3 that the English-type interaction between definite article and third person pronoun is the only way of yielding a third person gap. Note that this is not an argument against the PDA- and PF-based analysis of the third person gap proposed here for English, but simply suggests that a third person gap may also arise in different configurations. It is also not a reason to adopt an alternative analysis of unagreement over that based on the structure in (68), since neither Choi’s (2014a) specifier-based proposal nor the view that APCs in these (and other) languages involve apposition (Ackema & Neeleman 2018) offer an obvious explanation for the third person gap in these languages.

I am not offering a worked-out solution to this problem here, but a brief sketch of a possible analytical approach based on (68) and the assumption that the third person gap is an edge-based PF phenomenon even here. The account for (68) encodes the difference between overt and covert pronouns through the [±DEM] feature. This is probably sufficient for languages that use demonstratives as third person pronouns (e.g. Greek), but in languages like Spanish demonstratives and third person pronouns can both appear “pronominally.” This suggests that they differ in some respect, even though generally pronouns and demonstratives seem to behave as members of the same distributional class (Blake 2001; Choi 2014a; Höhn 2016). So there has to be an additional feature that distinguishes whether Pers is realised as a demonstrative or a personal pronoun. If the VIs for demonstratives are underspecified for this distinguishing feature and the VI for the third person pronouns is restricted to right-edge contexts, then the VI for the third person pronoun can be inserted in right-edge contexts on a Pers node containing the relevant feature. It could not be inserted in structures where Pers contains the relevant “pronoun feature” but is accompanied by further overt material within the nominal phrase. The demonstrative VI would always win instead, creating the observable third person gap. A proper investigation would have to check in detail whether such an approach makes the right predictions, and an important open question concerns, of course, the identity and representation of the hypothetical distinguishing feature.

It may be noted that even though the three languages above do not fall under the PDA-based explanation for the English third person gap, they still conform to the hypothesis that GAP₃ languages generally have distinct articles. Recall that all these languages are found in the same overall area, roughly corresponding to Standard Average European plus Welsh and Semitic. If the third person gap is indeed restricted to this geographically relatively contiguous area, this raises the possibility that it is connected to areal diffusion of a surface pattern, although its specific implementation may vary depending on particular aspects of nominal structure. The fact that the wide occurrence of article systems is also considered a feature of Standard Average European (Haspelmath 2001: 1494) would be compatible with a scenario where the development of both features is indeed connected.

Glosses

ACC = accusative, AUTH = author, CONJ = conjunction, DEF = definite, DEM = demonstrative, DET = determiner, EXCL = exclusive, F = feminine, FOC = focus, HON = honorific, INCL = inclusive, IPFV = imperfective, LOC = locative, M = masculine, N = neuter, NEG = negative, NOM = nominative, NUM = numeral, PART = participant, PL = plural, PRS = present, PURP = purposive, RED = reduplication, REFL = reflexive, SG = singular, TAM = tense-aspectmood marker.

Acronyms

Art_no = lacking distinct articles, Art_yes = having articles distinct from third person pronouns, APC = adnominal pronoun construction, APC₃ = allowing third person APCs, BIC = Bayesian information criterion, GAP³ = displaying a third person gap, PDA = pronominal determiner analysis, VI = Vocabulary Item, xnP = extended nominal projection.