By: Victoria Zoogah
Impersonal pronouns have been claimed to express generic reference that possess a special connection to the speaker in unembedded contexts. Siewierska (2004.2010) argues that impersonal pronoun use refers not to a specific individual or group of individuals but to people in general or loosely specified context. They are present in languages in forms as dedicated impersonal pronouns, personal pronouns with impersonal functions, reflexives used impersonally and interrogative pronouns used impersonally. Impersonal pronouns widely analyzed to include the above forms present an important yet under-explored paradigm of self-reference, as the nonspecific they carry often depicts itself as generic reference that bears a special connection to the speaker (Moltmann 2006, 2010a; Malamud 2012,2013). The paper explores a four-way classification proposed by the authors to analyze speaker’s relatedness to the impersonal pronouns they use. The four way classification established is to capture the range of speaker related interpretations associated with impersonal pronouns. The authors chart the speaker- relatedness of impersonal pronouns by presenting contrastive evidence from English, French, and Thai that corroborates their classification of the speaker’s involvement in the generic uses of an impersonal pronoun. The central aim of the researchers is to test their proposed classifications on the three languages being surveyed. The analysis of the data shows how speaker relatedness of impersonal pronouns can be critically determined based on context.
References:
Expressing the Self. First edition. Minyao Huang and Kasia M. Jaszczolt (eds) This chapter © Minyao Huang, Jiranthara Srioutai, and Mélanie Gréaux 2018. First published in 2018 by Oxford University Press.
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