Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic : A questionnaire-based comparative study of Afrikaans, Dutch and English

Van Olmen, Daniel and Breed, Adri (2018) Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic : A questionnaire-based comparative study of Afrikaans, Dutch and English. Studies in Language, 42 (4). pp. 798-846. ISSN 0378-4177

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Studies in Language
Additional Information:
This article has been accepted for publication in Studies of Language, Volume 41, Issue 4, 2018, pages: 798-846, © 2018 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3315
Subjects:
?? communicationlinguistics and languagelanguage and linguistics ??
ID Code:
127183
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
03 Sep 2018 09:58
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
05 Dec 2023 01:27