The paper is devoted to the grammatical categories of the personal pronouns of the Germanic
languages in their paradigmatic relation. The aim is to describe the categories of personal pronoun
forms in their systemic relation and common terms. The categories of personal pronouns are considered
on the base of the well-known concept of R. Jacobson that reveals the binary nature
of grammatical structures. It is shown that the combination of positive and negative features
of the categories of person and number make up the system core common to all Germanic languages.
The category of gender in the languages in question can be described only according to
the third person that is unmarked of both the category of person and number. Whereas in all West
Germanic languages there are three gender forms in the third person, the Scandinavian languages
possess a special forth form replacing nouns of the so-called «general» gender uniting the former
forms of male and female genders.
The most significant differences between the Germanic languages concern the category
of case. The only case opposition common to all the languages concerned is the opposition of
nominative and non-nominative. The German languages break down in three groups. The first
type involves English, Dutch, Frisian, Afrikaans with the only one opposition mentioned above.
The second type is realized in the Scandinavian languages – Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian
where besides the opposition of nominative/non-nominative the additional opposition of genitive/
non-genitive is available. The genitive forms in these languages are used as possessive pronouns.
The third type is represented by German, in which there are two different processes to be
considered. On the one hand, the genitive forms of personal pronouns are easily derived from all
pronouns, but they are hardly in use in the everyday speech. On the other hand, a remarkable feature
of German and its daughter-language Yiddish is the striking stability of the additional opposition
of dative/non-dative that was lost in the other Germanic languages many centuries ago.
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