Abstract
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.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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