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Impersonal Pronouns in Norwegian, Swedish, and German (completed)

The project investigated the grammatical similarities and differences of impersonal pronouns in Norwegian, Swedish, and German.

Illustration of arbitrary individuals

Illustration: IPG_CORE (Sarah Zobel)

About the project

An open question in the cross-linguistic research on impersonal pronouns is whether the semantic behaviour of impersonal pronouns can be attributed to a single impersonal core meaning.

An open question regarding the theoretical analysis of impersonal pronouns is whether and how impersonal meaning should be derived from a complex underlying morphosyntactic structure.

This project, "Looking for the Impersonal Core -- Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages" (IPG_CORE), addressed both questions in a controlled cross-linguistic setting by looking at the semantic and morphosyntactic behaviour of three cognate pronouns -- Norwegian, Swedish, and German man -- both in root clauses and embedded in attitude contexts.

Objectives

The empirical aim of this project was to gather new linguistic data on Norwegian, Swedish, and German impersonal pronouns using corpus linguistic studies and fieldwork methodology.

The research mainly concerned the impersonal pronoun man, which occurs in all three Germanic languages, but seems to have different possible uses in the three languages. A minor objective is also to compare the Norwegian impersonal pronouns 'man' and 'en' regarding their uses and possible interpretations.

On the theoretical side, the project aimed to combine recent morphosyntactic results on pronominal typology with syntactic and semantic research on impersonal pronouns in order to gain a more comprehensive picture of the grammar of Norwegian, Swedish, and German 'man' and to propose a full compositional analysis.

Cooperation

Besides the main cooperation with Pritty Patel-Grosz, Professor in Linguistics at ILN, the project benefited from local cooperation with Jozina Vander Klok and the Tekstlab at ILN, as well as a wide network of international researchers with syntactic and semantic expertise in (im)personal pronouns and intensional expressions.

Project activities and results

Comparative questionnaire studies

Based on the results of the corpus studies, the (potential) existential use of German, Norwegian, and Swedish man and its discourse behavior was investigated in three parallel questionnaire studies.

German, Norwegian, and Swedish participants were presented with utterances containing man in context and had to judge whether these utterances were acceptable in the given context.

Native speaker consultants (construction of materials):

  • Norwegian: Åshild Løvvig
  • Swedish: Heidi Darvell

First results have been presented at LingORG.

Corpus studies: the interpretation and use of man

Three corpus studies were conducted to investigate the range of possible uses and interpretations of German, Norwegian, and Swedish man.

For each of the three languages, a random sample of attested uses of man was further annotated by native speaker annotators for grammatical properties that correlate with different generic and existential uses of impersonal pronouns as described in Gast and van der Auwera 2013 and Cabredo Hofherr 2015.

Annotators:

  • German: Judith Lauterbach, Sarah Zobel
  • Norwegian: Tonje Andersen, Ingvild Røsok
  • Swedish: Larissa Darvell, Victor Frans

First results of these studies for German and Norwegian have been presented at NGL 12.

Publications and presentations

Publications

  • Zobel, Sarah. to appear. The impersonal use of German first person singular ich.
    Accepted for publication at Linguistic Inquiry.
  • Zobel, Sarah. to appear. Restrictions on the Generic Interpretation of Dedicated Impersonal Pronouns. In: Proceedings of WCCFL 39.
  • Zobel, Sarah. to appear. Quantificational variability effects with German größtenteils and implicit agents. In: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25.
  • Zobel, Sarah. 2020. Exploring the existential semantics of the German impersonal pronoun man in episodic sentences. In: Mariam Asatryan, Yixiao Song und Ayana Whitmal (eds.), NELS 50, Vol. 3, GLSA Amherst. 269--278.

Presentations

Results of IPG_CORE were presented at the following occasions:

2021

  • The uses of the impersonal pronoun ‘man’ in written German and Norwegian (Bokmål). Presented at 12th International Conference on Nordic and General Linguistics, Universitetet i Oslo, June 15, Oslo, Norway.
  • Two types of existential quantification (with Jan Köpping). Presented at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Bochum, May 5, Bochum, Germany.
  • A third man? On the German impersonal pronoun man in speech reports. Presented at the semantics group of Viola Schmitt, HU Berlin, April 22, Berlin, Germany.
  • German man and the discourse behavior of its existential use. Presented at LingORG, Universitetet i Oslo, April 19, Oslo, Norway.
  • Restrictions on the generic interpretation of dedicated impersonal pronouns. Seminar session held at Yale (lecturers: Raffaella Zanuttini and Milena Šereikaitė), April 21, New Haven, CT, USA.
  • Restrictions on the generic interpretation of dedicated impersonal pronouns. Poster presented at 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, University of Arizona, April 9, Tucson, AZ, USA.
  • Two types of existential quantification (with Jan Köpping). Invited online presentation at the Semantics Colloquium, University of Frankfurt, January 28, Frankfurt, Germany.

2020

  • Quantificational variability effects with German größtenteils and implicit agents. Presented at Sinn und Bedeutung 25, University College London / Queen Mary University of London, September 3--9 London, UK. (Video of the presentation)
  • Ways to talk about individuals: the case of German man in episodic sentences. Invited talk presented at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Bochum, May 14, Bochum, Germany.
  • The existential use of German 'man' and implicit agents of passives. Invited talk at the Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, March 4, Vienna, Austria.
  • Who dunnit? The existential implications of impersonal pronouns and implicit agents. Invited talk at 21st Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics, March 1, Szklarska Poreba, Poland.

2019

  • A closer look at German `existential man'. Presented at Forum for Theoretical Linguistics, University of Oslo, November 27, Oslo, Norway.
  • A non-existential analysis for the German impersonal pronoun ‘man’ in episodic
    sentences. Poster presented at NELS 50 (MIT), October 25, Cambridge, MA, USA.
  • Introducing: Looking for the Impersonal Core – Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages. Presented at LingORG, University of Oslo, September 17, Oslo, Norway.
  • Capturing the semantics and pragmatics of impersonal pronominal expressions. Presented at Variables and the (Meta)semantics of Context-Sensitivity, September 24, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Published Jan. 31, 2020 4:06 PM - Last modified Dec. 8, 2023 1:17 PM

Contact

Sarah Magdalena Zobel

Participants

Detailed list of participants