Pronouns

Pronouns stand for noun phrases or phrases of other categories. Personal pronouns may encode nominal features (animacy, case, gender) and enter feature sharing relations with elements occurring sentence-internally or in the discourse. The common property of Romance languages is the presence of adverbal clitic pronouns in addition to strong pronouns. In spite of being adverbal, clitic pronouns are not verbal affixes but must be considered as independent words. Clitic pronouns derive from Latin weak pronouns. Weak pronouns were attested in older stages of Romance languages and are still found in some modern Romance languages. Pronouns may be classified into subclasses depending on the grammatical features they realise. In addition to personal pronouns, reflexive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, and indefinite pronouns are found. Like personal pronouns, these subclasses may be realised in different formats (clitic, weak, strong), suggesting that the two classifications are orthogonal.