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Article published In:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 22:1 (2022) ► pp.1–42

A questionnaire-based study of impersonalization in Romanian and English

With special attention to passivization

| University of Cambridge , UK
ORCID logo | Lancaster University , UK

This paper is the first contrastive study of impersonalization in Romanian and English. Taking an acceptability judgment approach, we describe the functional potential in all impersonal uses of not only the pronouns ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ but also the lesser studied passive. We find inter alia: a similar division of labor in the languages between ‘you’ and ‘they’ for contexts paraphrasable as, respectively, ‘everyone’ and ‘someone/some people’; a wider range of uses for pro-dropped ‘they’ than for its overt counterpart, as hypothesized in previous research; and a preference in English, but not Romanian, for passives to ‘they’ especially in contexts like ‘they’ve stolen my wallet!’, where the referent is entirely unidentifiable and likely to be singular. Levels of identifiability and number, each of which has been suggested in a separate semantic map as necessary for capturing impersonalization, are also shown to interact, supporting a proposal to combine them in one map.

Keywords: impersonal, pronoun, passive, semantic map, English/Romanian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Impersonalization
    • 1.2Impersonal constructions
    • 1.3Languages
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Acceptability judgment questionnaires
    • 2.2Questionnaire design
    • 2.3Implementation
    • 2.4Statistics
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Universal-internal uses
      • 3.1.1In general
      • 3.1.2‘You’ and ‘one’
      • 3.1.3The passive, versus ‘you’
    • 3.2Non-universal-internal uses
      • 3.2.1In general
      • 3.2.2‘They’
      • 3.2.3The passive, versus ‘they’
    • 3.3Summary
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 21 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.20004.rad
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