Het onpersoonlijke gebruik van de Afrikaanse persoonlijke voornaamwoorden 'jy' en 'hule'

Groenen, Gonneke and Breed, Adri and Van Olmen, Daniel (2023) Het onpersoonlijke gebruik van de Afrikaanse persoonlijke voornaamwoorden 'jy' en 'hule'. Internationale Neerlandistiek, 61 (1). pp. 59-82. ISSN 1876-9071

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Abstract

In many (West) Germanic languages we see that personal pronouns can be used in impersonal contexts. These pronouns are often referred to as Human Impersonal Pronouns (HIPs). This is also the case for Afrikaans with the personal pronouns ‘jy’ and ‘hulle’. Since ‘('n) mens’ as a HIP in written standard Afrikaans has already received attention in Afrikaans corpus investigations, the aim of this investigation is to understand the use of ‘jy’ and ‘hulle’ in written standard Afrikaans. These pronouns can be seen as grammatical constructions, which can develop/change over time. Typology research on impersonalization has identified twelve impersonal contexts in which HIPs can be used. To investigate the use of ‘jy’ and ‘hulle’ it is important to have an understanding of impersonalization. For this project the Taalkommissiekorpus (2011) is used. The content of the corpus is divided into three subcategories, each representing a text genre: Fiction + non-fiction/non-academic (in short: books); academic and other formal texts (study guides/academic articles/minutes; in short: formal); and the third one is based on newspaper and magazine articles.