Abstract
Impersonal pronouns are pervasive in the world’s languages; boundaries between personal and impersonal paradigms are porous. Thus, in many languages, 2
nd
-person pronouns can be impersonal (i), and vary under the influence of quantificational adverbs like
always
and
rarely
.
In those days, you always/usually/rarely lived to be 60.
Additionally, dedicated impersonal pronouns may have a special association with the speaker, as argued for English
one
(Safir
2004
; Moltmann
2006
,
2010
) and German
man
(Kratzer
1997
) (ii).
One can see this picture from the entrance. (from Moltmann
2006
)
Es war klar, dass man sich nie mehr wiedersehen würde.
It was clear that man REFL never again see.again would
‘It was clear that we will never see each other again.’ (from Kratzer
1997
)
This paper presents a comparative investigation of the interpretation of impersonal pronouns in English and German, each of which shows signs of both indexicality and impersonal, variable interpretation. The analysis places these pronouns within the pronominal paradigms of English and German, presenting a novel combination of independently-motivated type-shifting mechanisms (Pustejovsky
1995
) and an expansion of the general theory of pronominal features (Kratzer
2009
). I argue that distinct elements in the semantics of the items are responsible for the varying impersonal and the indexical behaviours. This is a step towards understanding the processes that take pronouns from the personal to the impersonal category, or back.