Human impersonal pronouns in Swedish and Dutch

Breed

2018

Language Sciences

This paper is the first in-depth study of the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: jy 'you', ('n) mens '(a) human' and hulle 'they'. It adopts a double questionnaire approach, consisting of an acceptability judgment task for one group of participants and a completion task for another group. On the theoretical side, we test the different dimensions proposed in two of the most recent semantic maps of human impersonal pronouns. The first map features vague, inferred and specific existential uses, which vary in the kind/degree of (un)knownness. The second one distinguishes existential contexts that only allow a plural interpretation from existential contexts that are neutral with respect to number. The results of our questionnaires indicate not only that the dimensions of number and (un)knownness involve gradual instead of categorical distinctions but also that they interact with one another, with decreasing acceptability and usage of hulle along both of them. More generally, the completion task data suggest that human impersonal pronouns are not the preferred strategy for impersonalization in existential contexts anyway. On the descriptive side, we show that Afrikaans has a division of labor between ('n) mens and jy on the one hand and hulle on the other. The former are restricted to universal-internal uses, the latter to universal-external, speech act verb and existential ones. The data also reveal that speakers may consider the less grammaticalized form 'n mens more acceptable but that they tend to employ more grammaticalized mens. It thus attests to the usefulness of combining the two types of questionnaire. Keywords impersonal, pronoun, Afrikaans, questionnaire, semantic map 1. are a collective that has the right and/or power to install speed cameras. The police and the government are two likely candidates. This semi-impersonal existential use is typically called 'corporate' (a term that goes back to Pesetsky 1996, p. 39). (2) a. Eng In Greece, they drive quite unpredictably. b. Eng They have installed new speed cameras here. The three uses that Siewierska and Papastathi (2011) regard as genuinely impersonal are illustrated in (1b) and (3). They differ in the type or level of (un)knownness, as argued by Cabredo Hofherr (2006) among others. In the 'vague' use in (1b), the set of human participants cannot be identified by the interlocutors but there is said to be at least one specific person who committed the known act of stealing the car. In (3a), the speaker gathers from the situation, i.e. the smell in the room, that the essentially unknown event of consuming pizza there must have occurred and that an unidentifiable (group of) eater(s) must have existed. This use is labeled 'inferred'. In the 'specific' use in (3b), the event takes place at a particular place and time and the interlocutors may thus have certain expectations about who is performing it. Despite the situational potential for identification, the (set of) individual(s) knocking on the door is not explicitly named, however. (3) a. Eng They ha...

Section: ('N) Mensmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: a double questionnaire-based study

Breed

2018

Language Sciences

“…Other Germanic languages that have been studied are Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, German and Swedish (e.g. Coussé and van der Auwera 2012;De Hoop and Tarenskeen 2015;Gast 2015;Jensen and Gregersen 2016;Fenger 2018;Van Olmen and Breed 2018a). Romance has received considerable attention too, with publications on French (Creissels 2008b), Portuguese (Posio and Vilkuna 2013) and Spanish (Fernández 2013) among others.…”

Section: Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A questionnaire-based study of impersonalization in Romanian and English

Rădulescu

2021

LiC

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.

“…Siewierska, 2011;Gast & van der Auwera, 2013), tweedens word korpusse ondersoek, (bv. Marin-Arrese, Caro & Becerril, 2001;Coussé & van der Auwera, 2012), en derdens word sprekers van 'n bepaalde taal gewerf om 'n taalkundige vraelys in te vul (bv. Siewierska, 2008;Garcia, Sallandre & L'Huillier, 2018).…”

Section: Kontekstualiseringunclassified

Onverpersoonlikingstrategieë in Afrikaans

Breed

Chan

2021

Tydskr. geesteswet.

OPSOMMING Hierdie artikel ondersoek die verskillende strategieë wat Afrikaanse sprekers gebruik om aan te dui dat 'n konstruksie onpersoonlik is. Onpersoonlike konstruksies is konstruksies waar die (soms implisiete) subjek geparafraseer kan word as "mense in die algemeen", " 'n onbekende persoon" of "sommige mense". Hierdie onderwerp het al baie aandag in die taalkundeliteratuur gekry, maar die fokus was meestal op 'n beperkte aantal onverpersoonlikingstrategieë, soos die gebruik van persoonlike voornaamwoorde (bv. Jy leef net een keer), onbepaalde voornaamwoorde (byvoorbeeld Iemand het my beursie gesteel!) en passiewe konstruksies (byvoorbeeld My kar is gesteel). Volgens ons kan dié nou fokus in die literatuur toegeskryf word aan die feit dat die navorsingsmetodes (byvoorbeeld korpusstudies en vraelyste) wat tot op hede gebruik is om onverpersoonlikingstrategieë te ondersoek, navorsers slegs in staat stel om op deduktiewe wyse na die strategieë te kyk. Tot op hede is daar nog nie 'n studie uitgevoer om te bepaal i) watter verskillende moontlike onverpersoonlikingstrategieë deur Afrikaanse sprekers aangewend kan word nie, en ii) of daar bepaalde voorkeure vir sprekers bestaan oor watter strategieë om te gebruik in die verskillende en onderskeibare onpersoonlike kontekste. Hierdie ondersoek beantwoord hierdie twee vrae deur die resultate van 'n visuele vraelys - wat aan ongeveer 450 Afrikaanssprekende respondente gegee is om te beantwoord - te bestudeer. Trefwoorde: onpersoonlik; onverpersoonliking; agenslose passief; menslike onpersoonlike voornaamwoord; universeel; eksistensieel; onverper-soonlikingstrategie. ABSTRACT In this article, we examine impersonal constructions in Afrikaans, i.e. constructions without a referential subject or, put differently, constructions where the (implicit) subject can be paraphrased as "people in general", "someone" or "somepeople". This topic has already received considerable attention in the literature but the focus has generally been on a limited number of strategies, such as human impersonal pronouns (e.g. mens leef net een keer "one only lives once") and the passive construction (e.g. my kar is gesteel "my car has been stolen"). In our view, this narrow focus in the literature is at least partly due to the limitations of the language-based methods (e.g. corpus studies and questionnaires) currently used in the research. These methods essentially facilitate a deductive approach by investigating a predetermined set of more or less established impersonal constructions. The present study, by contrast, adopts a more open-ended approach in order to get a better sense of the range of possible strategies that speakers of Afrikaans can use in different impersonal contexts and of the constructions that they prefer to employ in those various impersonal uses. We therefore draw on a visual questionnaire with few linguistic cues. Each scene in this questionnaire depicts a particular impersonal context - based on the distinguishing criteria found in the existing semantic maps of the domain of impersonalisation (such as quantification, perspective and veridicality) and respondents are encouraged to provide a sentence that captures the situation. The questionnaire was published online, promoted via social media and completed by more than 400 respondents. The findings show first of all that there exist numerous alternatives to the well-known strategies of impersonalisation. In addition to pronouns (e.g. jy "you" in wat gebeur as jy die knoppie druk? "what happens when you press that button?") and passives (e.g. is gepluk "were picked" in terwyl jy geslaap het, is al die appels gepluk "while you were asleep, all the apples were picked"), the types of constructions identified in our study include but are not restricted to: nouns with the meaning "people" and an extra evaluative connotation (e.g. morsjorse "litterbugs" in morsjorse het gister hier gesit en drink "litterbugs were drinking here yesterday"), the generic use of the imperative (e.g. onthou "remember" in onthou om altyd jou sitplekgordel vas te maak! "remember always to fasten your seat belt!"), nominalisations (e.g. koud kry "getting cold" in die winter is vir koud kry gemaak "winter is made for getting cold") and free-choice constructions (e.g. wie ook al "whoever" in wie ook al gister hier sokker gespeel het, het hul bal vergeet "whoever played soccer here yesterday forgot their ball"). Our results are furthermore suggestive of the impersonal constructions that are clearly favoured by speakers of Afrikaans. They indicate, for instance, that the established but still comparatively under-researched strategy of passivisation is used across all impersonal contexts and is even regularly preferred to the better-studied pronouns in certain uses (e.g. daar is al weer terreuraanvalle uitgevoer "terror attacks have again been carried out" instead of hulle het al weer terreuraanvalle uitgevoer "they have again carried out terror attacks"). Indefinite pronouns too are found to be among the most common constructions - especially, though not only, in contexts assuming the existence of a particular unidentified person responsible for some event (e.g. iemand "someone" in iemand het al die appels gepluk "someone has picked all the apples"). Nouns with the meaning "people", finally, also appear to be quite favoured by speakers of Afrikaans and they occur in a variety of impersonal uses, such as statements about people in general that do not, however, include the speaker or the addressee (e.g. mense "people" in in China eet mense rys "in China, people eat rice"). Keywords: impersonal; impersonalisation; agensless passive; human impersonal pronouns; universal; existential; impersonalisation strategy