Detail #438: Pronouns that behave differently

I didn't find a good heading for this, so an explanation is in order.

English actually provides a morphological example of this idea:

he | she | you
him | her | you
his | her | your
his | hers | yours

So, each of these three pronouns conflate some form that a different pronoun distinguishes. But what other fields besides morphology could we have different behaviors in the pronouns?

1. Purely word-order based differences

Maybe the masculine and feminine pronouns (or the plurals or whatever) behave differently in the vicinity of adpositions, verbs or other nouns, consider a language where these were the only way of expressing possession:

the car of his
her car

i.e. the car of hers / his car would not be on the table

This, I think, is a fairly probable difference that I would not be surprised to find even in some Indo-European language, and at the very least as a statistical piece of grammar (i.e. "SOV for masculine pronoun objects 80% of the time, SVO 20%, and for feminine pronoun objects it's 60% vs. 40%). In my dialect of Swedish, I am also fairly sure that NOUN POSS (where POSS is possessive pronoun) is more common for a few pronouns, and POSS NOUN is more common for a few others.

2. Referential scope

The anaphoric properties of pronouns can be an interesting aspect of grammar. One could consider a language where the properties of masculine and feminine pronouns (or neuter pronouns or whatever) are distinct. Here are some examples of possible differences:

2.1 Implicit references

In some sense, the Swedish, German, Russian and Ukrainian  'it' (det, es, это, це)  all seem to behave slightly different from the other third person pronouns, in that they sometimes clearly have non-neuter reference, and also are used to refer in somewhat implicit ways. I have no better way of phrasing what I mean by "implicit ways", but the example here should suffice:

Vem är det? Det är min bror. (Who is it? It is my brother. Not "he is my brother".)

I am pretty sure similar use of the neuter pronoun beyond a strict neuter reference is permissible in many other slavic and germanic languages as well. I would not be surprised if this also holds for modern Greek as well as any other IE languages that have not lost the neuter.

2.2 Syntactical binding

In Old High German, 'sein' could be reflexive as well as third person masculine in general; thus, 'he sees his car' could be either the car of the subject or of some other third person. 'she sees his car' could be either the car of the subject or of some other third person. 'she sees her car' could only be the car of some other female third person.

2.3 Use with underspecified reference

In several languages, masculine pronouns can be used when the gender of the referent is unclear. In some languages, neuter is used in some circumstances when the reference further is somewhat unclear.

3. Restrictions on usage / licensing / resumptive use

One could imagine a language where one particular pronoun can be used resumptively for any gender, or conversely, that one of the genders require resumptive use but the other doesn't.

Certain verbs could also have restrictions on which pronouns may stand as various arguments, such that a noun that would be referred to by a 'forbidden' pronoun must stand in full, e.g.

she [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed him

* he [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed her

John [culturally specific verb that has a restriction on pronoun]-ed her

Certain prepositions might not permit the use of one of the pronouns, or some distinctions may be conflated with one - or a three-way distinction might be two-way for any given pronoun (i.e. masculine conflates meanings 1 and 2, feminine conflates meanings 2 and 3). 

4. Pro-drop

Conditions on pro-drop might well apply differently.