Towards a typology of human impersonal pronouns
Final Report Abstract
Impersonal pronouns such as Germ. man and Fr. on are used to fill argument positions with unspecific sets of human participants, in generalizing as well as episodic sentences: (1) a. Man lebt nur einmal. (generalizing/universal) b. Man hat mein Fahrrad gestohlen. (episodic/existential) (2) a. On ne vit qu’une fois. (generalizing/universal) b. On a volé mon vélo. (episodic/existential). Such pronouns are often restricted in terms of their distribution, and depending on the type of context they may acquire different interpretive properties. For instance, while Germ. man and Fr. on are used in both generalizing and episodic sentences, Engl. one is basically restricted to generalizing contexts, and in episodic sentences some other expression is used, e.g. the pronoun they: (3) a. One only lives once. (generalizing); b. They’ve stolen my bike! (episodic). Similar distributional restrictions and interpretive variability is found in many other languages of the world. In our project, we therefore addressed the following main question: (4) Under what circumstances are (specific types of) impersonal pronouns used, and with what interpretive properties? We approached this question from a language-particular as well as cross-linguistic point of view, combining theoretical with empirical (corpus-based) investigations. In a first step, we developed a classification system for an analysis of the distribution and interpretation of impersonal pronouns. It was based on parameters like the type of event quantification of the host sentence (generalizing, episodic), the veridicality of the minimal proposition containing the pronoun (veridical, non-veridical), the type of quantification over participants (universal, existential), contextual restrictions on the set of participants quantified over, and speech-act-participant (SAP) inclusion or exclusion (incl., excl.). The question of SAP-inclusion received special attention because it concerns an important and non-trivial parameter in the use and interpretation of impersonals. We carried out detailed studies of second person singular pronouns in impersonal uses (e.g. As a forward you have to be selfish), showing that the effect of using a second person form impersonally is primarily located at an interactional and emotive level, establishing joint empathy (shared by the speech act participants) with the set of participants quantified over. In our typological investigations our classification system allowed us to generalize over the types of contexts that a given pronoun can occur in. We used semantic graphs to represent general restrictions on the distribution of impersonal pronouns, as well as the range of distribution for specific pronouns. In this way we were able to generalize over possible historical developments and, by extension, over possible synchronic language states. For example, we could show that impersonal uses of third person plural forms as illustrated in (3)b. above emerge in contexts of collective reference to a definite set, and that they are generalized from there to less specific categories, and to sets of participants with smaller cardinalities. Our data has been stored in an online database and is accessible to the linguistic community. At present (December 2015), the database contains data on 188 strategies from 49 languages (with varying degrees of quality). In our empirical studies we focused on the distribution of impersonals in English, Russian and Italian. Contrastive studies of these languages and German were particularly instructive because English, Russian and Italian lack a specialized impersonal pronoun such as Germ. man, and the distribution of the more specific strategies (e.g. one, you, they in English) gave us insights into the domain of impersonals in general. Our studies have shown that the European languages investigated by us organize their systems of impersonals mostly around the categories of veridicality and modality, with SAP inclusion playing a prominent role, while the type of event quantification is of minor importance. More specific results were obtained by using multinomial logistic regression, which allowed us to make predictions about the type of strategy used in a given context. The Typological Database of Impersonal Pronouns: http://linktype.iaa.uni-jena.de:8080/~vogast/xld/
Publications
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(2012). Human impersonal pronouns in English, Dutch and German. Special issue on 'A Germanic Sandwich', ed. by E. Ruigendijk. Leuvense Bijdragen 98.1: 27-64
van der Auwera, J., V. Gast and J. Vanderbiesen
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(2013). Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages. In Bakker, D. & M. Haspelmath (eds.): Languages Across Boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska, 119-158. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton
Gast, V. & J. van der Auwera
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(2014). A corpus-based study of human impersonal constructions in Russian. In Jaworski, S. and J. Witko (eds.), New Insights into Slavic Linguistics. Frankfurt: Lang
Rudolf, Olga
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(2015). Human impersonal strategies in English and Russian. PhD dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena
Rudolf, Olga
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(2015). Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy. In Sorlin, S. & L. Gardelle (eds.): The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns, 311-334. Amsterdam: Benjamins
Deringer, L., V. Gast, F. Haas & O. Rudolf
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(2015). Impersonal uses of the second person singular: A pragmatic analysis of generalization and empathy effects. Special issue on ‘The flexibility of pronoun reference in context’, ed. by L. Hogeweg & E. de Hoop. Journal of Pragmatics 88: 148–162
Gast, V., L. Deringer, F. Haas and O. Rudolf
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(2015). On the use of translation corpora in contrastive linguistics: A case study of impersonalization in English and German. Special issue on 'Contrasting contrastive approaches', ed. by B. Defrancq. Languages in Contrast: 4-33
Gast, V.
