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Bi-uniqueness violation in Old and Modern English personal pronouns: How and by which pronouns?

Paper · 2025 · Alireza Mahmoodi

Summary

The paper asks which English personal pronouns break bi-uniqueness, the natural morphology principle that each form should carry one meaning and each meaning one form. It also compares how often Old and Modern English break it. Natural morphology treats such violations as unnatural, and therefore marked. The author took the Old English paradigm mainly from Hogg (1992) and the Modern English one from Azar and Hagen (2014). The pronouns were sorted by number, case, gender and person, following Haspelmath and Sims, and each cell was checked for syncretism. Dependent possessives and reflexives were left out of the Modern English set.

First person forms are fully bi-unique in both periods. Second and third person forms are not. Modern English has two offending forms, you and it. In Old English the count reaches eight: the second person forms ēow, inc and þē, and the third person forms his, hit, him, hēo and hī. The author concludes that Old English deviates more and suggests that some marked forms became natural or disappeared over time. The study matters as a small, explicit test of a markedness criterion on a well-documented paradigm. It also points to a trade-off between bi-uniqueness and linguistic economy.

Key points

  • Data sources:
    • Old English pronoun tables come from Hogg (1992: 144–145) and cover singular, dual and plural across nominative, accusative, genitive and dative.
    • Modern English pronouns come from Azar and Hagen (2014: 139) and cover subject, object and independent possessive forms.
  • Old English second person: accusative and dative coincide in every number (þē, inc, ēow). The author reads this as a tendency of these two cases to merge.
  • Old English third person: forms are shared across several cells.
    • hī and hēo serve plural nominative and accusative, and also appear in the feminine.
    • him covers masculine, neuter and plural dative.
    • hit is both nominative and accusative neuter.
    • his serves both masculine and neuter genitive.
    • hire is noted as genitive and dative feminine but is not counted in the final list.
  • Modern English: you is ambiguous for number in both subject and object position, and it does not distinguish subject from object. All other forms are bi-unique.
  • Summary count (Table 6): first person shows no violation and second and third person show violations in both languages. The total is 8 marked Old English pronouns versus 2 Modern English ones.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Lay a paradigm out as a grid of feature cells and flag any form that fills more than one cell; this gives a mechanical, checkable definition of syncretism.
  • I2. Bi-uniqueness can fail in two directions: allomorphy is one meaning with many forms, and syncretism is one form with many meanings. Treating these as separate failure types clarifies which direction causes trouble for a given task.
  • I3. Counting marked forms per paradigm gives a simple comparative metric between two language stages (here 8 vs 2).
  • I4. The paper frames homophony as a cost the language pays for economy, so ambiguity is expected rather than accidental.
  • I5. The study declares its exclusions explicitly (dependent possessives and reflexives are left out), which makes its counts interpretable and reproducible.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): the en morphology could use such a grid to mark you (Number) and it (Case) as inherently underspecified, leaving the features open instead of forcing a guess.
  • I2 (back): in generation, allomorphy is what matters (choosing a form from features), while syncretism is harmless there; the realizer can be tested against the many-forms cells only.
  • I3 (tree): the same count over feature-to-form mappings could compare how much morphological ambiguity different treebanks or UD dialects leave for the parser to resolve.
  • I4 (frames): the coreference step can treat singular/plural you and subject/object it as known ambiguity points that always need context, and log which cue resolved them.
  • I5 (learn): evaluations of morphology or pronoun resolution should state excluded categories up front, so scores across runs and witness parsers stay comparable.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Alireza Mahmoodi. 2025. Bi-uniqueness violation in Old and Modern English personal pronouns: How and by which pronouns?. Językoznawstwo.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.25312/j.10256

@inproceedings{mahmoodi2025bi,
  title = {{Bi-uniqueness violation in Old and Modern English personal pronouns: How and by which pronouns?}},
  author = {Alireza Mahmoodi},
  booktitle = {Językoznawstwo},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.25312/j.10256},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.25312/j.10256}
}

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