Compound pronouns in English

This article explores the syntax of compound pronouns (e.g. someone, nothing). Several theories of these formatives have been proposed previously (e.g. Kishimoto 2000; Blohdorn 2009), but most of them fail to account for the fact that compound pronouns behave simultaneously like compounds and phrases. By presenting corpus data of some special coordination and modification patterns of compound pronouns, I argue that they should instead be analysed as compound phrases: constructions which are morphologically compounds, but syntactically phrases. Both features play important roles in determining how compound phrases are modified. Moreover, I propose a modification paradigm based on Larson & Marusic (2004), which classifies common postmodifiers at different levels. Finally, I examine the syntactic behaviour of less frequently used nominal compound pronouns such as nobody, which are supplementary to the phrasal ones.