Parameters of Poor Pronoun Systems
Daniel Harbour · Linguistic Inquiry · 2016
The world’s smallest pronoun systems can eschew any of the following contrasts: (a) author-nonauthor, (b) participant-nonparticipant, (c) singular-nonsingular. This supports the view that features are mutually independent parameters ( Harbour 2011a , 2014a , 2016 ), but is problematic for Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s (2014) reworking of the Rich Agreement Hypothesis, which is predicated on the claim that (a)–(c) are universally obligatory. The facts necessitate revision of Koeneman and Zeijlstra’s proposal.