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Impersonal indexicals: one, you, man, and du

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Abstract

Impersonal pronouns are pervasive in the world’s languages; boundaries between personal and impersonal paradigms are porous. Thus, in many languages, 2nd-person pronouns can be impersonal (i), and vary under the influence of quantificational adverbs like always and rarely.

  1. (i)

    In those days, you always/usually/rarely lived to be 60.

Additionally, dedicated impersonal pronouns may have a special association with the speaker, as argued for English one (Safir 2004; Moltmann 2006, 2010) and German man (Kratzer 1997) (ii).

  1. (ii)
    1. a.

      One can see this picture from the entrance. (from Moltmann 2006)

    2. b.

      Es war klar, dass man sich nie mehr wiedersehen würde.

      It was clear that man REFL never again see.again would

      ‘It was clear that we will never see each other again.’ (from Kratzer 1997)

This paper presents a comparative investigation of the interpretation of impersonal pronouns in English and German, each of which shows signs of both indexicality and impersonal, variable interpretation. The analysis places these pronouns within the pronominal paradigms of English and German, presenting a novel combination of independently-motivated type-shifting mechanisms (Pustejovsky 1995) and an expansion of the general theory of pronominal features (Kratzer 2009). I argue that distinct elements in the semantics of the items are responsible for the varying impersonal and the indexical behaviours. This is a step towards understanding the processes that take pronouns from the personal to the impersonal category, or back.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Brandeis University, 415 South Street, Waltham, MA, 02454-9110, USA

    Sophia A. Malamud

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Malamud, S.A. Impersonal indexicals: one, you, man, and du . J Comp German Linguistics 15, 1–48 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-012-9047-6

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