IPG_CORE · Looking for the Impersonal Core -- Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages

Looking for the Impersonal Core -- Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages

The overarching theoretical question that guided IPG_CORE was "Can the behaviour of impersonal pronouns across languages be traced back to a single impersonal core meaning?" This question was motivated by the observation that even impersonal pronouns of languages that belong to the same language family seem to differ in their grammatical behavior. A case in point are Norwegian, Swedish, and German, which all share the impersonal pronoun 'man'. In general, three types of uses have been described for impersonal pronouns: (i) a generic use with a meaning close to 'people in general', (ii) an existential use with a meaning close to 'someone', and (iii) a referential use with a meaning close to 'I'/'we'. For Norwegian, Swedish, and German 'man', the available uses have been reported to differ: German 'man' has a generic and an existential use. Swedish 'man' has all three uses. For Norwegian 'man', the empirical picture is less clear: while the generic use is clearly available, the data reported on the existential use is ambiguous, and the referential use has not been discussed, so far. So, aside from the empirical gaps in connection with Norwegian 'man', the differences in the available uses across the three languages make 'man' an ideal object of study in order to come closer to an answer to the overarching theoretical question. The main objective of IPG_CORE was to provide empirical data and theoretical results on the grammatical behavior of German, Norwegian, and Swedish 'man' in order to improve our understanding of the grammar of impersonal pronouns. Due to the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and early results of the project, the strategy to meet this objective was adapted in the course of the project. Specifically, the theoretical investigation of the possible uses of 'man' took precedence over the collection of empirical data, and the empirical investigations targeted the behavior of 'man' in main clauses only. This adapted strategy resulted in the following insights: (i) German, Norwegian, and Swedish only share the generic use in all of their varieties. While German and Swedish 'man' have a generic and existential use, the existential use is only available in written Norwegian (Bokmål), spoken Norwegian only allows for the generic use. (ii) The existential use (of 'man') differs in its grammatical behavior from expressions with an intuitively similar existential meaning, but it shares its exceptional existential meaning with implicit agents of passives (i.e., the agents of the actions reported in passive sentences that are not stated explicitly). (iii) The generic use (of 'man') differs from other generically interpreted nominal expressions in that it has to be licensed by accompanying linguistic material, which results in simple sentences being ill-formed (e.g., ??"Man niest" in German or ??"One sneezes" in English are not well-formed statements about people in general). (iv) The empirical and theoretical results suggest that impersonal pronouns with more than one use are fully ambiguous (i.e., the uses do not have a shared underlying meaning). Thus, given the current state of evidence and available formal analyses, it is highly implausible that a core meaning covering all uses of 'man' in German, Norwegian, and Swedish exists. IPG_CORE is at its core basic linguistic research. However, impersonal 'man' as a pronoun derived from the Germanic word for male individuals (Engl. 'man') is of interest in connection with gender-sensitive language. Understanding the range of interpretations available may inform a discussion of how 'man' could be avoided/substituted, should the use of 'man' be generally gender-imbalanced.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union