Detail #291: Personal Pronouns with Complications

Few conlangs complicate up the third person pronoun a lot. Certainly such conlangs exist, but I still think it's reasonable to make up a short sketch of a language where personal pronouns are significantly more complicated, in order to inspire more such conlanging.

Let's consider a language where grammatical gender does not exist. There's one primary distinction, however – either animate-inanimate or human-nonhuman. I'll go with the latter. So, we now have pronouns for humans (let's use the Finnish pronoun 'hän' as a stand-in for this), and non-humans (let's borrow from Finnish again, 'se'). 

However, the language permits using other pronouns for third persons along a variety of distinctions. There's no necessity for there to be a pair of contrasting pronouns, even. We could imagine a pronoun for 'masculine' existing without a pronoun for 'feminine'; thus 'hän' could refer to either a man or a woman, but 'he' would refer specifically to a male. We could imagine certain age groups having pronouns, people of certain statuses or maybe in certain relative ranks of status, etc. Different pronouns could make different number distinctions as well. 

What could we do to make such words sufficiently unlike nouns to justifiably deem them pronouns? A few strategies exist:

• they can mark different grammatical categories
• more or fewer case distinctions (esp. convincing if nouns almost fully lack them)
• more or less specific number distinctions
• more suppletion
• lack of definiteness marking
• differences in distribution of articles and the like (i.e. they do not take counters or articles at all)
•  syntactical differences
• require antecedent or other referent to bind to
• follow the same binding rules as other pronouns with regards to what nouns they can refer to
• may not permit having adjectives or even attributes at all; may just restrict what kinds of attributes they accept (e.g. no relative clauses)
• may be cliticized as 'almost-congruence' markers on verbs in ways that nouns don't; sometimes, appear doubly due to this.
• tend to keep referring to the same referent after the first use, even if other possible referents surface - other third person pronouns that may fit the bill for the new referent will be used
• form reflexive pronouns
• have class-specific indefinite pronouns for each of the kinds of indefinite pronouns that the language distinguishes for indefinite pronouns in general, whereas nouns behave in a less complicated way with regards to indefiniteness of that type