Pronoun Origins: Early or late, simple or complex? Martin Edwardes King’s College London martin.edwardes@btopenworld.com Abstract Pronouns seem to express the components of communication (the sender, receiver and referent) in reduced terms, acting as placeholders for more complex noun meanings. For von Humboldt (1836), pronouns appeared early in the genesis of grammar, allowing the expression of communicator roles before personal nominalisation began. They appeared in the order of first person (the sender), second person (the receiver) and third person (the content of the utterance). For Heine and Kuteva (2007), pronouns emerged from noun usage as desemanticised and decategorised placemarkers for nouns. The three persons probably emerged together – and in quite different ways in different languages. Pronouns are devalued in current grammars. For Hurford (1994), “A pronoun is typically a little word that stands in place of a noun phrase”. It is grammatically more constrained than a noun phrase, and therefore simpler; and the different natures of the three persons is trivial. Hudson (1998), using a very different approach to grammar, nonetheless largely agrees with Hurford. Evans and Green (2006), give only two pages on the role of pronouns in cognitive linguistics, and largely agree with Hurford and Hudson about their nature. Benveniste (1970) sees first and second person pronouns as different from third person: “I” and “you” reflect roles in the communicative act, the third person is just part of the signal. Benveniste therefore describes the third person as a “non-person”. Van Hoek (2007) builds a similar model from a cognitive linguistics viewpoint, discussing the “on-stage” and “offstage” nature of pronouns. She sees the first and second person as representative of the actual sender and receiver, who are able to share a view of the utterance as a performance which may include themselves. The third person, in contrast, is “held at arm’s length”. This paper uses van Hoek (2007) and Edwardes (2014) to explore the origins of pronouns. It proposes that pronouns come from the exchange of social models, and they represent a meta-awareness of the communication act. They require hierarchical cognitive modelling: the communication model (sender-signal-receiver) is viewed by the sender and receiver as if they are outside the communication, and their communicative roles are then represented within the signal (for example, as actor-action-patient). I model myself as the sender or receiver, and then model the sender or receiver modelling themself within the signal – our models of me and you can also model me and you. Pronouns allow the different modelling levels to be collapsed into a single conceptual whole of selfhood. The paper discusses the capacity to model selves within modelled selves, and its role within the genesis of language. It shows that pronouns represent a sophisticated form of cognition which probably came relatively late in language genesis. The nature of pronouns What is a pronoun? For what appears to be a closed-class, constrained group of lexical items, the answer is surprisingly complex. Even the more traditional models of grammar cannot agree on a single definition. For instance, while Jim Hurford (1994,