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- Title
A native origin for Present-Day English they, their, them.
- Authors
Cole, Marcelle
- Abstract
It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike.
- Subjects
OLD Norse language; OLD English language; MIDDLE English language; PRONOMINALS (Grammar); PRONOUNS (Grammar); FOREIGN elements in the English language
- Publication
Diachronica, 2018, Vol 35, Issue 2, p165
- ISSN
0176-4225
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1075/dia.16026.col