You jerk!

Last night I was upset and yelled at a friend:

1. Don't do that, you jerk!

This got me thinking about the idea that pronouns are Determiner heads with some kind of NP ellipsis, which has been proposed in Elbourne 2002 (and earlier). In other words, maybe sentence 1 is the D with the NP complement, but no ellipsis.  Elbourne 2002 discusses things like this in section 2.1.2, and he provides the following data from Postal 1966:

1. we Americans
2. us linguists
3. you Communists
4. (dialectally) them guys, (Scots) they Sassenachs
5. You troops will embark but the other troops will remain.
6. We Americans distrust you Europeans.

The general idea is that pronouns like 'we', 'us', 'you' and maybe 'them'/'they' are determiners just like 'the'/'these'.  (Postal 1966 gives reasons why these are not vocatives or appositives, some of which are summarized in Elbourne.)  In normal contexts, then, when you say "You are tall", there is ellipsis of the NP complement of 'you'.

I like this analysis.

But then I got to thinking more... why does standard American English only allow 'you(pl)' and 'we'/'us' to be used in this way?  Note that 'you(sg)' like I mentioned earlier can only be used in when 'you NP' is some kind of vocative (like in example 1).  Consider the paradigm below:

7. * I linguist am fun.
   * John likes me linguist.
8. * You linguist are fun.
   * John likes you linguist.
9. * She linguist is fun.
   * John likes me her linguist.
10. We linguists are fun.
    John likes us linguists.
11. You linguists are fun.
    John likes you linguists.
12. % They linguists are fun.
    % John likes them linguists.

Only a small portion of Ds behave in the way this kind of analysis would allow.  So, what bars 8-10 for everyone, and 13 for some dialects?  Weirdly, the dialects that allow "they NP" and "them NP" seem to be mutually exclusive (as far as I know).  It might be tempting to think that having a component of 'you' in your pronoun is a requirement, assuming that 'we' = 'you' + 'I'.  However, English 'we' can be exclusive -- example 11 above can be said when it means "Mary and me", excluding the addressee.  But even if 'you' were a necessary component, what would that mean?  That 'you' is the only D with an NP complement?

I'm sure the data might get even more complex if we look closer, and I suspect Postal did in his 1966 paper.  However, that's not readily findable online (and I don't have time to look this up in the library right now), and even if he had the generalizations to describe the data patterns in 8-13, he probably doesn't give an analysis that fits in modern linguistic theory.

So here are our generalizations on English pronouns with NP complements:

• Generalization 1: Singular 'you' can have an NP complement, but only when it is vocative.
• Generalization 2: Only plural pronouns allow an NP complement in argument positions.
• Generalization 3: Standard dialects only allow first and second pronouns to have NP complements.
• Generalization 4: Dialects may allow third person pronouns to have NP complements, depending on the case of the pronoun.

This leads to a bigger picture generalization:

• Big Generalization: UG provides a way for pronouns to have NP complements, but may be sensitive to the pronoun's case/number/person features.

I don't have any hypotheses right now explaining these generalizations, but maybe I'll come back to this some day.  Does anyone out there have some ideas?