By Juan Uriagereka
Some time in the High Middle Ages, the Romance languages created a determiner system from chunks of the demonstrative paradigm of Latin. This language did not have definite articles, nor did it have third person pronouns—it used demonstratives to refer to third persons. In fact, in many (though not in all)2 Romance dialects, the Latin demonstratives used for the determiner paradigm are the same ones used for the pronominal paradigm; see Wanner (1988) for these matters. An empirical issue is then raised with respect to whether in some structural sense pronouns and determiners are of the same type. The intuition behind this idea goes back to Postal (1966), who specifically argued for “so-called pronouns” being nothing but a “determiner + one” (that is, he = the one).