A  B is a B is a B. A detailed investigation into the Assertion of Characterization hypothesis for English with pronouns

Kelli Hesseltine

Hesseltine and Davis (2020) examine instances of the order of words in English and propose the Assertion of Characterization hypothesis. To communicate an assertion of an entity’s characterizing traits, language users employ two different meanings:   weaker , signaled by the order AB as in long (A) hair (B) , and stronger , signaled by BA as in hair (B) long (A) . The attribution of the characterization is thus made less or more assertively. Expanding on that publication, current work focuses in more granular detail on the use of these meanings in examples where the characterized entity, the B of the signal, is a linguistic form traditionally termed a “pronoun.” Although the hypothesis holds regardless of the traditional categorization, one particular aspect of characterized “pronouns,” one that marks them as different from other types of characterized entities or Bs, invites this further investigation: Pronouns, when character- ized by an adjective, occur much more frequently in the order that indicates the stronger  Assertion of Characterization (BA, e.g., her lucky, someone special , vs. AB lucky her, special someone ).  A close look at this subset of Bs makes clear why they skew the way they do.

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