Article published in:
Studies in Language
Vol. 42:4 (2018) ► pp. 798–846

Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic

A questionnaire-based comparative study of Afrikaans, Dutch and English

| Lancaster University
| North-West University Potchefstroom
In this article, we examine and compare the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. The second person singular, the third person plural and the ‘man’- and ‘one’-pronouns are studied by means of an acceptability judgment questionnaire and a completion questionnaire. The combination of the two methods reveals interesting descriptive facts about the three West Germanic languages. They include, among other things, the ‘man’-prominence of Afrikaans versus the ‘you’-prominence of Dutch and English for expressing the universal meaning ‘anyone’ and the more prominent position of ‘they’ in Dutch than in the other languages for conveying the existential meaning ‘someone, some people’. Our findings have a number of more theoretical implications too. The two existing semantic maps for human impersonal pronouns make different distinctions in the existential domain, based on type/level of (un)knownness on the one hand and number on the other. Our study tests both sets of distinctions and shows that the two dimensions interact with each other in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. The results thus support a recent proposal in the literature for a combined semantic map. The data from the completion questionnaire, finally, also indicates that existential uses prefer alternative forms of impersonalization to human impersonal pronouns in all three languages.
Keywords: acceptability, Afrikaans, completion, Dutch, English, impersonal pronoun, questionnaire, semantic map
Published online: 04 February 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18036.van
References

References

Baayen, R. Harald
2008 Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bard, Ellen G., Dan Robertson & Antonella Sorace
1996 Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability. Language 72(1). 32–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia
2010 Binding properties of impersonal human pronouns in generic and episodic contexts. http://​archive​.sfl​.cnrs​.fr​/sites​/sfl​/IMG​/pdf​/impersMay2010CabredoHofherrManOnLa​.pdf (6 April 2017.)
Cheshire, Jenny
2013 Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17(5). 608–633. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coussé, Evie & Johan van der Auwera
2012 Human impersonal pronouns in Swedish and Dutch: A contrastive study of man and men . Languages in Contrast 12(2). 121–138. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
De Hoop, Helen & Sammie Tarenskeen
2015 It’s all about you in Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics 88. 163–175. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Deringer, Lisa, Volker Gast, Florian Haas & Olga Rudolf
2015 Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy: An exploratory corpus study of English, German and Russian. In Laure Gardelle & Sandrine Sorlin (eds.), The pragmatics of personal pronouns, 311–334. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Donaldson, Bruce C.
1993 A Grammar of Afrikaans. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Duinhoven, A. M.
1990 Verdwijnt men? [Is men disappearing?] In Hans den Besten, A. M. Duinhoven & Jan P. A. Stroop (eds.), Vragende wijs: Vragen over tekst, taal en taalgeschiedenis [Interrogative mood: Questions about tekst, language and language history], 70–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Fonesca-Greber, Bonnie & Linda R. Waugh
2003 On the radical difference between the subject personal pronouns in written and spoken European French. In Pepi Leistyna & Charles F. Meyer (eds.), Corpus analysis: Language structure and language use, 225–240. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Gast, Volker
2015 On the use of translation corpora in contrastive linguistics: A case study of impersonalization in English and German. Languages in Contrast 15(1). 4–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017 Online database for a typology of human impersonal pronouns. http://​www​.personal​.uni​-jena​.de​/~mu65qev​/improtype (4 July 2017.)
Gast, Volker, Lisa Deringer, Florian Haas & Olga Rudolf
2015 Impersonal uses of the second person singular: A pragmatic analysis of generalization and empathy effects. Journal of Pragmatics 88. 148–162. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gast, Volker & Johan van der Auwera
2013 Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages. In Dik Bakker & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), Languages across boundaries: Studies in the memory of Anna Siewierska, 119–158. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giacalone Ramat, Anna & Andrea Sansò
2007 The spread and decline of indefinite man-constructions in European languages: An areal perspective. In Paolo Ramat & Elisa Roma (eds.), Europe and the Mediterranean linguistic areas: Convergences from a historical and typological Perspective, 95–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Greenbaum, Sidney & Randolph Quirk
1970 Elicitation experiments in English: Linguistic studies in use and attitude. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Jarich
2010 On the impersonal pronoun men in Modern West Frisian. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 13(1). 31–59. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hofmeister, Philip, T. Florian Jaeger, Ivan Sag, Inbal Arnon & Neal Snider
2007 Locality and accessibility in wh-questions. In Sam Featherston & Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.), Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, 185–206. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
IBM Corp.
2013 IBM SPSS statistics for Windows: Version 22.0. Armonk: IBM Corp.Google Scholar
Kirsten, Johanita
2016 Grammatikale verandering in Afrikaans van 1911–2010 [Grammatical change in Afrikaans from 1991–2010]. Vanderbijlpark: North-West University dissertation.Google Scholar
Malamud, Sophia A.
2013 (In)definiteness-driven typology of arbitrary items. Lingua 126. 1–31. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Posio, Pekka & Maria Vilkuna
2013 Referential dimensions of human impersonals in dialectal European Portuguese and Finnish. Linguistics 51(1). 177–229. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rasinger, Sebastian M.
2013 Quantitative research in linguistics: An introduction. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna
2004 Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Overlap and complementarity in reference impersonals: Man-constructions vs. third person plural-impersonal in the languages of Europe. In Andrej Malchukov & Anna Siewierska (eds.), Impersonal constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, 57–89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna & Maria Papastathi
2011 Towards a typology of third personal plural impersonals. Linguistics 49(3). 575–610. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sprouse, Jon & Diogo Almeida
2012 Assessing the reliability of textbook data in syntax: Adger’s Core Syntax . Journal of Linguistics 48(3). 609–652. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan
2011 Standard Average European. In Bernd Kortmann & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Europe: A comprehensive guide, 291–306. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan, Volker Gast & Jeroen Vanderbiesen
2012 Human impersonal pronoun uses in English, Dutch and German. Leuvense Bijdragen 98. 27–64.Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir A. Plungian
1998 Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2(1). 79–124. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Van Olmen, Daniël & Adri Breed
2018 Human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: A double questionnaire-based study. Language Sciences 69. 1–29.Google Scholar
Van Olmen, Daniël, Adri Breed & Ben Verhoeven
2018 A corpus-based study of the human impersonal pronoun (’n) mens in Afrikaans: Compared to men and een mens in Dutch. Languages in Contrast (Online First) http://​www​.jbe​-platform​.com​/content​/journals​/10​.1075​/lic​.17004​.van (17 August 2018.)
Weerman, Fred
2006 It’s the economy, stupid: Een vergelijkende blik op men en man [It’s the economy, stupid: A comparative look at men en man ]. In Matthias Hüning, Ulrike Vogl, Ton van der Wouden & Arie Verhagen (eds.), Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels [Dutch between German and English], 19–47. Leiden: Stichting Neerlandistiek Leiden.Google Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela
2001  Man lebt nur einmal: Morphosyntax und Semantik des Pronomens man . Deutsche Sprache 28(3). 232–253.Google Scholar
Zobel, Sarah
2016 A pragmatic analysis of German impersonally used first person singular ich . Pragmatics 26(3). 379–416. CrossrefGoogle Scholar