Authors

Egor Tsedryk¹;  ¹ Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada

Discussion

In this talk, I offer a comprehensive overview of the subject pronouns in East Slavic languages (Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian), focusing on their referential and non-referential as well as overt and non-overt instances. The East Slavic pronominal system will be analyzed in the framework that takes person features as functions operating on a set of possible referents (Ackema and Neeleman 2018). The underlying idea of the proposed analysis is that adding phi-features to a bare (rootless) noun phrase (Barbosa 2019) does not automatically provide a referential index, and a D-head is required for further discursive instantiation (Farkas and de Swart 2003). The D-head also provides the necessary morpho-syntactic context for a phonological realization of pronoun. The conclusion is that regardless of an apparent absence of D with lexical NPs in East Slavic, we cannot claim that these languages lack D in their grammars. This category is vital for their pronominal system. 
References
Ackema, Peter, and Ad Neeleman. 2018. Features of person: From the inventory of persons to their morphological realization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Barbosa, Pilar. 2019. Pro as a minimal nP: Toward a unified approach to pro-drop. Linguistic Inquiry 50 (3). 487–526. 
Farkas, Donka, and Henriëtte de Swart. 2003. The semantics of incorporation. Stanford, CA.