Dissimilation and referential form: Evidence from Finnish personal pronouns and anaphoric demonstratives

Kaiser, Elsi (2025) Dissimilation and referential form: Evidence from Finnish personal pronouns and anaphoric demonstratives. ACTA LINGUISTICA ACADEMICA, 72 (3). pp. 408-453. ISSN 2559-8201

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Abstract

In many languages, two referentially disjoint personal pronouns can occur in the same domain (e.g., she saw her), as expected given Binding Principle B. I present corpus-based and judgment-based evidence showing that Finnish patterns differently and is subject to a Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint: When two expressions in the same local domain (coarguments of the same verb) are referentially distinct, realizing them both as personal pronouns is dispreferred. In other words, sequences such as ‘She saw her’ sound very odd in Finnish, but replacing one of the personal pronouns with an anaphoric demonstrative yields an acceptable sentence. I present evidence showing that the Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint cannot be reduced to a pure disambiguation phenomenon, nor to linear proximity, phonological similarity, or the presence of another option in the language’s anaphoric paradigm. After presenting large-scale corpus data assessing the robustness of the Pronoun Dissimilation Constraint, I return to the question about the source of this constraint, and explore links to other work on dissimilation phenomena and obviation patterns in Algonquian languages.

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