1.4 Data discussion – part III: Pragmatic preferences and effects
1.4.3 Participant-oriented pragmatic effects
The pragmatic effects of impersonally usedich and du and of the impersonal pronoun man can be divided into two distinct aspects: (i) a speaker-oriented aspect, shared by the three pronouns, and (ii) a general participant-oriented aspect, which is only observable—in different “flavors”— for ich and du.
Impersonally interpreted ich, du, and man have a common speaker-oriented core.
Moltmann (2006) and Zifonun (2000) observe for English one and German man, re-spectively, that they can be used to express generalizations to which the speaker has a personal connection of some sort: either (i) the speaker has personal experience which supports the validity of the generalization in question, or from which he infers it, or (ii) the speaker presents an established generalization for which he is certain that it applies to him / would apply to him if he had the relevant properties.
The speaker-orientation contributed by English one and German man is best ob-served in comparison with indefinite noun phrases in ordinary generic sentences, see (99) and (100), which roughly translates example(99).
(99) a. One can see the picture from the entrance.
(Moltmann 2006:258)
b. People can see the picture from the entrance.
(100) a. Man
Moltmann (2006) argues that the connection to the speaker that is communicated by one provides the epistemic grounds underlying the speaker’s assertion (i.e. why the speaker believes that the generalization holds). That is, a speaker can utterOne can see the picture from the entrance after he saw the picture from the entrance himself,
61I thank Thomas Weskott (p.c.) for pointing this out to me.
and generalized from his experience. In contrast, Moltmann argues that generalizing from a subjective experience is not enough to utter People can see the picture from the entrance, which requires “objective” evidence.
The same speaker-orientation is also observable for the impersonal uses of ich and du. Compare the sentences in (101)with (100-b).
(101) a. Ich
Crucially, the examples in (100) and (101) only differ with respect to the additional pragmatic effects. On the truth-conditional level, the ordinary generic sentence in (100-b) expresses the same regularity with respect to visitors as (100-a) and the sen-tences in (101): ‘Visitors can see the picture from the entrance’.
Example (102) illustrates the effect of the speaker-oriented component. Since man automatically communicates that the speaker believes that he actually or presumably falls under the generalization that is expressed, denying it afterwards results in prag-matic oddness.62
‘As a gentleman, one has to hold open the door for others. #But I, a gentle-man, don’t have to.’
The effect persists if man is substituted by impersonally usedich and du. Presumably English you also patterns with one in this respect; as Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) state, one of the functions of impersonally used you is to express assimilation on the part of the speaker to a wider generality.
Note that the judgements for all of the examples in this section that test for pragmatic oddness are subtle. To my mind, however, in all of these examples clear contrasts exist between the sentences containing impersonally interpreted pronouns and simple generic sentences formed with bare plurals.
For the impersonal uses of ich and du, additional pragmatic effects are observed, which involve the creation of either distance or closeness between the speaker and other people. These effects are independent of the shared speaker-orientation discussed above. Impersonal man has no comparable, additional effects.
Concerning the additional participant-related effects, second person (singular) you and du behave in the same way. The impersonal uses of both pronouns aim to
cre-62I thank Sebastian B¨ucking for discussing this effect with me.
ate closeness or an informal camaraderie between the speaker and the addressee (cf.
Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) and Malamud (2006, 2007) for English you). Malamud suggests that the impersonal use ofyou is an invitation for the addressee to put himself in the shoes of the individuals that the generalization is about, i.e. to empathize with these individuals. Kitagawa and Lehrer, in turn, propose that one of the rhetorical functions of the impersonal use is to induce “situational insertion” for the addressee.63 They further argue that the pragmatic addressee-orientation of the impersonal use of you is connected to the observation that the speaker cannot explicitly exclude the ad-dressee from a generalization that he stated with impersonalyou.64 This is illustrated in(103-b)for (103-a).
(103) a. But I have a gift for teaching . . . Plus, teaching fiction writing is a lot like writing. You have to examine manuscripts, use your mind, come up with possibilities, respond to characters in situations. In a lot of ways, it’s like working on your own work.
(Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990:741)
b. *?You have to examine manuscripts — I don’t mean you personally — use your mind.
(Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990:743)
The same oddness is observable for German du if, as in (104), the applicability to the addressee is explicitly denied.
(104) Du
‘As a childcare specialist, you (imp.) have to treat every child in the group equally well. But that does not apply to you (the addressee) personally.’
Hence, for both impersonally used you and du an explicit exclusion of the addressee clashes with the addressee-oriented presentation of the generalization.
A similar observation can be made for the presumed ready acceptance of the state-ment by the addressee, which cannot be explicitly negated either, see(105).65
63Rojas(2011) reports a similar behavior for impersonally used second person singular pronouns in Spanish as spoken in Chile. On the basis of a corpus study, she argues that the impersonal uses express a special form of evidentiality: (i) most of the time, the source of the information is a generalization made on the basis of the speaker’s own experiences, and (ii) the generalization is expressed in a manner as to appeal to the addressee in an emotional fashion, and to convince them that they might find themselves in a similar situation.
64The impersonal reading ofyou can be made explicit by denying a referential use through adding the appositivenot YOU you (upper case signals stress; p.c. E. Allyn Smith). Note that the denial of the referential use, though, is not the same as denying applicability to the addressee. It “only”
mitigates a direct accusation which would result from the referential reading.
65The same note regarding the subtlety of the judgment applies for this example. In addition, it
(105) Als
‘As a childcare specialist, you (imp.) have to interact well with children.
#But I am sure that you (add.) view matters differently from me.’
The participant-oriented effect of impersonally interpreted ich is in stark contrast to the effect of impersonally used du. It signals distance between the speaker and other people—but not necessarily other discourse participants. Impersonally usedich is most often used to criticize or complain about the actions or opinions of others, or to state
“unpopular opinions” that the speaker aims to defend. In addition, the impersonal use of ich seems to be connected to heightened emotional involvement on the part of the speaker. That is, the speaker fully endorses the rule expressed by his statement.
In parallel to the participant-oriented effects of du, the speaker’s endorsement for the generalization cannot be explicitly denied. As illustrated in (106), such an attempt results in pragmatic oddness.
(106) Ich
‘As a farmer, one has to milk one’s cows (and I support this fully). #But for all I care, farmers can do what they want.’
In addition, the speaker may signal various emotions with the use of ich, e.g. irri-tation, anger, or incredulity. These additionally conveyed emotions are contextually triggered, though, and not an integral part of the participant-related component ofich.
Reconsider (107), repeated from above.
(107) Ich
‘I think this is an absolutely stupid argument! The bridal couple can’t expect their guests to more or less pay for the party!’66
In the first sentence of (107), the speaker explicitly states her attitude towards the
should be avoided to read the two sentences with a deliberate pause in between since (105)improves if the speaker “has time” to change his mind about what he expects regarding the addressee and his opinions.
66 http://www.urbia.de/archiv/forum/th-2142726/Wieviel-Geld-zur-Hochzeit-schenken.html
topic under discussion. The generalization in the second sentence is then uttered with the same emotional coloring.
So in sum, impersonally interpreted ich and du and impersonal man induce addi-tional pragmatic speaker-oriented effects that can be characterized as the speaker’s belief that the generalization applies to him, or would apply to him if he had the rel-evant properties. The additional effects that are associated only with the impersonal uses ofich and du concern how the generalizations that are expressed are presented to the addressee and other discourse participants. Impersonally interpretedich is used to signal full endorsement by the speaker, but induces a distancing effect with respect to other individuals that do not share the speaker’s opinion. Impersonally interpreteddu, in contrast, mainly aims to build closeness between the speaker and the addressee.
One final observation in connection with the participant-oriented effects of imper-sonally interpreted personal pronouns is presented in Malamud (2006, 2007). As a consequence of the empathy invitation issued by the speaker, she observes what she calls “empathy tracking effects”: Whenever the impersonal reading of you co-occurs with another impersonally interpreted pronoun—in the case of English, the impersonal pronoun one—the addressee’s empathy is directed towards those individuals that you represents in the clause. Consider the following examples.
(108) a. One could have thrown you in jail for that. (empathy with object) b. You could have thrown one in jail for that. (empathy with subject)
(Malamud 2007:11)
In the first example, impersonally interpreted you is in object position, and the ad-dressee is invited to empathize with the people potentially thrown into jail. This contrasts with the impersonal use of you in subject position in the second example.
There, the addressee’s empathy is directed towards the people who potentially throw others into jail.
Analogous examples can be given in German for the impersonal use ofdu in contrast with the impersonal pronoun man. The following examples are close translations of the English examples above.67,68
67German man only has a nominative form. For all other cases the indefinite pronouneiner has to be used. Cf. Chapter2 for a discussion of impersonal pronouns in German and English.
68Malamud (2007) discusses the following examples to illustrate the empathy tracking effect for German du. I adapted the examples to show the empathy tracking parallel to the English example also because(i-b)contains subjunctive marking on the verb, which blocks the impersonal interpretation (cf. Section1.3). So, to my mind,(i-b)does not have the interpretation intended by Malamud.
(i) a. Damals
‘In those days, one would be thrown in jail for this kind of thing.’
(empathy could go either way) b. Damals
(109) a. Man
‘One could have thrown you in jail for that.’ (empathy with object)
b. Du
‘You could have thrown one in jail for that.’ (empathy with subject) A similar empathy tracking effect can be observed for the impersonal reading ofich, as well. In the following example, the impersonal reading ofich is contrasted with the German impersonal pronoun man.
(110) Aaaaber
‘But wait, honestly, if an employer places a job ad, then he has to double-check online whether the ad is fine. At least, if it’s an employer one wants to work for.’ 69
In both sentences of example(110), the speaker uses ich impersonally for employers in general. In the second sentence of (110), he additionally uses the impersonal pronoun man to talk about employees in general. This difference in pronominal form regarding employers and employees creates a different distribution of the speaker’s empathy. The set of individuals the speaker focusses on is the set of employers; the entire text is a complaint about negligent employers. Hence, the speaker’s heightened emotional involvement concerns the rules of conduct for employers rather than for employees.
Since in German three impersonally used pronominal forms are available, there is a third combination which could in principle occur, and produce empathy tracking effects: ich and du. Given their restrictions and respective participant-oriented effects, it seems unlikely to me that this combination should arise: Since ich is restricted to subject(-like) positions (cf. Section 1.3), any well-formed utterance of this kind should haveich in subject position anddu in object position. Furthermore such an utterance would have to express a statement that the speaker completely endorses for those individuals that ich is used for, but for which he believes that someone does not share his opinion. At the same time, the speaker would invite the addressee to empathize
‘In those days, you would be thrown in jail for this kind of thing.’
(empathise with the victim) (Malamud 2007:12)
69http://www.mediengestalter.info/forum/47/mein-spruch-des-tages-39931-1124.html
with those individualsduis used for, and would express that he expects the addressee to readily accept the general statement regarding these individuals. I have to admit that even though the existence of such a configuration cannot be excluded on the grounds that the pragmatic effects of ich and du are simply incompatible, I cannot think of a plausible example in which ich and du are clearly used impersonally. Hence at this point, I am forced to leave this as an open issue for further research.