Quantitative background of pronouns in English, Arabic and Tatar: Structural approach

Abstract

This paper deals with analyzing the contrasts in the ways of expressing quantity of the pronouns in three quite different languages, belonging to different language families: English (Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family), Arabic (southern branch of the Semitic language family) and Tatar (Turkic branch of the Altai language family). Contrastive typology is the area of this research. Pronouns as a part of the nominal group have specific grammatical characteristics and correspondingly share them with nouns, adjectives and numerals. For instance, English personal pronouns have person, number, gender and case categories. There are two elements of meaning in the semantics of Arabic personal pronouns: person-number-gender and case. Tatar personal pronouns possess person, number and case characteristics. Apart from the other nominal parts of speech, there are specific ways of expressing them. The number phenomenon, being highly complex, penetrates the pronouns as well. In this article we support the idea that the richer the morphological means of the language the more grammatical characteristics the pronouns possess.