Aspectos de la aportación hispanica a la teoría general del pronombre
Summary
The contribution of Hispanic grammarians to linguistic theory has been remarkable throughout the course of Western intellectual history. Of particular interest in the field of grammar is the notion of ‘pronoun’, the subject of the present article. Isidor of Seville is probably the first who – starting from the Commentaries of Sergius (fourth century A.D.) on the Grammar of Donatus – spelt out the concept of the pronoun as a stylistic device. Some 800 years later Antonio Nebrija (1442–1522) draws attention to problems connected with the article/pronoun opposition, which were considered in the work by Juan Claderón and Andres Bello in the 19th century, and studied in the 20th century by Hjelmslev and Postal, among others.
This paper summarizes the reasons, at times contradictory, that led scholars like Cristóbal de Villalón, Sanctius, Jiménez Patón, Gonzalo Correas, Bello, and others to exclude the pronoun from the list of parts of speech. Further, it discusses the intense labour carried out during the 19th century, on the one hand the controversy that raged within the Real Academica Española, and, on the other, the analysis proposed by Jaime Balmes (1810–1848). Balmes considered only personal pronouns as pronouns; in addition, he distinguished enunciation and utterance, established a person/non-person opposition, and attributed to personal pronouns the characteristic of what Jakobson termed ‘shifters’. Finally, the work of Rodolfo Lenz is reviewed in which a large category of substitutes were proposed, leading to the establishment of ‘pro-nouns’, ‘pro-adjectives’, ‘pro-adverbs’, and ‘pro-verbs’.