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Song, Kyung-An & Heine, Bernd. (2017). Some Patterns of Grammatical Change in Personal Pronouns. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 25(1), 139-162. The main goal of the present paper is to reconstruct some of the dynamics underlying the rise and development of personal pronouns in general and of forms for pronominal address in particular. By looking at a number of languages from different parts of the world, we argue that there is a generalized mechanism which accounts for some regularities in this development. The mechanism has some implications for the grammatical structure of the languages concerned. It seems to be responsible for the rise of new grammatical forms and for the loss of other ones, whereby categories and the system of personal deixis are redefined. Another implication is that the processes described in the paper may give rise to polysemous coding, i.e. the forms used for indirect personal reference serve both in their old and new functions simultaneously. |