1242: Pronouns versus Anaphors in English May 4, 2018

English doesn't have a 4th person for verbs, and indeed most languages don't. However, it is with the 4th person that Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) distinguished between when a third person object of a third person subject (e.g. 'him' in "he loves him") is referential or not. Instead, English uses 'himself' and 'him' to show when one is referential and the other is not. Therefore, any direct object pronoun of a third person subject will refer to another person; in “Brian loves him”, ‘him’ can only refers to someone else, always. Where this gets tricky in English but wouldn't necessarily in Greenlandic is when there are multiple clauses, e.g. "Brian said that she loves him" where 'him' could refer to anyone except for the 'she' in question, because even though 'himself' exists, it cannot appear here *"Brian said that she loves himself". These are rules which any English speaker knows without being aware of necessarily.
Today there was a new Word Theory on the Patreon, so check it out: https://www.patreon.com/posts/de-pressed-word-18598896?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=postshare