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Compound pronouns in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2020

ZHEN WU Open the ORCID record for ZHEN WU [Opens in a new window]
ZHEN WU*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature University College London Gower Street LondonWC1E [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the syntax of compound pronouns (e.g. someone, nothing). Several theories of these formatives have been proposed previously (e.g. Kishimoto 2000; Blöhdorn 2009), but most of them fail to account for the fact that compound pronouns behave simultaneously like compounds and phrases. By presenting corpus data of some special coordination and modification patterns of compound pronouns, I argue that they should instead be analysed as compound phrases: constructions which are morphologically compounds, but syntactically phrases. Both features play important roles in determining how compound phrases are modified. Moreover, I propose a modification paradigm based on Larson & Marušič (2004), which classifies common postmodifiers at different levels. Finally, I examine the syntactic behaviour of less frequently used nominal compound pronouns such as nobody, which are supplementary to the phrasal ones.

Keywords

syntaxsyntax–morphology interfacecompound pronounsmodification
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 825 - 849
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

1I would like to thank the reviewers of ELL for their critical comments. I am also very grateful to the Editor, Prof. Bernd Kortmann, and the journal for publishing this article. Finally, I am thankful for the supervision of Prof. Bas Aarts. All remaining errors are mine.

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