This paper provides the results of a typological survey which seeks to determine the most minimal... more This paper provides the results of a typological survey which seeks to determine the most minimal set of distinctions for person and number that argument categories in natural languages must realize. I demonstrate that arguments show at least a three-way distinction in person and a two-way distinction, a generalization which I refer to as the Person-Number Universal (PNU). The primary focus in this paper is on the properties of free pronouns as they are the most complex type of argument DPs, though nominal DPs and agreement morphology also contribute to person and number distinctions yielding the sum of person and number features that conform with PNU. In addition, the survey reveals an interesting typological division into two types of languages: i) languages in which person and number features only occur in free pronouns, and ii) languages in which person and number features are divided, with some person and/or number features realized as free pronouns while others appear in verbal inflections. I argue that this typological division can be accounted for through grammatical operations, providing two different syntactic analyses which utilize the existing theoretical machinery.
This paper provides the results of a typological survey which seeks to determine the most minimal... more This paper provides the results of a typological survey which seeks to determine the most minimal set of distinctions for person and number that argument categories in natural languages must realize. I demonstrate that arguments show at least a three-way distinction in person and a two-way distinction, a generalization which I refer to as the Person-Number Universal (PNU). The primary focus in this paper is on the properties of free pronouns as they are the most complex type of argument DPs, though nominal DPs and agreement morphology also contribute to person and number distinctions yielding the sum of person and number features that conform with PNU. In addition, the survey reveals an interesting typological division into two types of languages: i) languages in which person and number features only occur in free pronouns, and ii) languages in which person and number features are divided, with some person and/or number features realized as free pronouns while others appear in verbal inflections. I argue that this typological division can be accounted for through grammatical operations, providing two different syntactic analyses which utilize the existing theoretical machinery.
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