A study of the relation between personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in Chinese dialects

In Chinese some personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns share the same origins because of the conceptual cognitive mappings existing between the personal domain and demonstrative pronoun domain. The traces of such origins can also be found in the Chinese dialects which can be divided into three main categories. There exists a systematic correspondence between first person concept and proximal deixis concept, and between second person concept and distal deixis concept in Mandarin and southeast dialects. Therefore, the second personal pronoun er evolves into na , and the vacancy of the third personal pronoun can only be filled in with other pronouns which have nothing to do with proximal or distal demonstrative pronouns. Because of the mental distance of the referent of the third person concept and the historically later appearance of K series of distal demonstrative pronouns in the southeast dialects, the pronouns of the “other demonstrative” type ta and qi of specific reference similar in sound to the N series and the K series evolve into the third personal pronouns in the two categories of dialects. The concept of the third personal pronoun in northwest dialects corresponds to that of proximal deixis and distal deixis, and because its referent is mentally far, the distal demonstrative pronoun wu/na is used for the third personal pronoun as well. Such mechanism comes from Altaic languages. Probably similar is the evolution mechanism of the proximal demonstrative pronoun yi for the third personal pronoun.