This article examines the internal structure of personal pronouns in Inuktut. Building on previous work on syntactic variation and universals in personal pronoun systems (Harley and Ritter 2002, Ghomeshi and Massam 2020) and drawing on arguments that these and demonstrative pronouns are structurally complex (Déchaine and Wiltschko 2002, Leu 2015), it is argued that Inuktut pronouns are morphosyntactically complex, with exponents realizing multiple functional heads as well as an overt root. In particular, it is claimed that (local) person is represented twice, both as a root and in a higher functional projection. Previous arguments that Inuktut pronouns should instead be analyzed as D heads based on Adnominal Pronoun Constructions are also addressed (Yuan 2018, 2021).

Old French (OF) determiners (D), which are optional, show a three-way split between definite (def), indefinite(indf), and expletive(expl) D. We develop a nano-syntactic analysis of these three paradigms, according to which the nominal spine is associated with a series of functional heads that include Number, Gender, D, and Kase. We test the predictions of the formal analysis with a quantitative analysis of corpus data from two 12th century Anglo-Norman texts – Le voyage de saint Brendan (B) and Lais de Marie de France (MdF) – which indicates that over a 60-year span, there are changes in the distribution of D. This presents itself in three ways. First, a decline in expletive D in MdF correlates with an increase in the use of D with masculine (m) non-count nouns (nNON-CT) Second, while B lacks an overt indefinite plural (pl) D, MdF has one in the form of des. Third, with count nouns(nCT), while feminine (f) nouns favour the absence of determiners in B, there is no gender effect in MdF. While the first two changes are predicted by the formal analysis, the third is not. More broadly, the results of our quantitative study provide a more nuanced picture of the factors that govern the distribution of D in OF: they confirm that – relative to conditioning the absence of D (D-drop) – definiteness, grammatical function, and number are stable factors, gender is not a stable factor, and word order does not play a significant role.

This paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.