The impersonal use and its connection to genericity

Examples(2)-(5)again exemplify the central data points that will be dealt with in this thesis.⁴

’A bridal couple can’t expect their guests to more or less pay for the party!’⁵ (3) Wenn

‘If a team wants to win, it has to enter the field motivated.’⁶

(4) Du

‘A woman can’t expect every guy to chase after her.’⁷ (5) Wenn

‘If a trader wants buys a vehicle from someone, and wants to resell it, then he has to let it get checked beforehand.’⁸

The crucial observation for(2)–(5)is that even though first and second person singular pronouns occur in these examples, they do not express statements about the speaker or the addressee, respectively. Instead, they express general statements about people sharing a certain property: example (2)talks about bridal couples in general, example

4The following data discussion nearly exclusively discusses impersonal readings of first and second person singular pronouns in declarative sentences. Impersonal readings that occur in questions and imperatives will be addressed briefly at the end of this section.

5 http://www.urbia.de/archiv/forum/th-2142726/Wieviel-Geld-zur-Hochzeit-schenken.html

6http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article532778/Schlechte_Argumente_fuer_den_

Aufnahmeantrag_an_die_G_14.html(with slight modifications)

7 http://forum.gofeminin.de/forum/couple1/__f64874_couple1-Wie-kann-ich-ihm-zeigen-dass-ich-ihn-wirklich-mag-razz-AMOUR.html#698995

8http://diskussionen.quoka.de/viewtopic.php?t=691

(3) about teams in general, example (4) about women in general, and example (5) about traders in general.

The aim of this entire section is to get an understanding of the semantic contribution of the impersonal use ofich anddu by comparing the impersonal uses to the impersonal pronoun man and the corresponding referential uses. The following discussion also includes observations and insights from Gruber (2011) and Malamud (2007, 2012), who also investigate impersonally used German second person singular du, and from Kitagawa and Lehrer(1990) and Malamud(2006,2007,2012) on English impersonally used you.⁹

The function of sentences containing impersonally used first and second person sin-gular pronouns is to express specific kinds of statements, i.e. generalizations, rules, norms, regulations, and other general statements about a individuals with a certain common property. In other words, sentences of this form intuitively express generic statements; this is reflected in the translations of (2)–(5).

This intuition is supported primarily by the observation that sentences containing impersonally interpreted personal pronouns show all of the characteristic properties that have been identified for generic sentences. The three central properties of generic sentences are (i) that they are used to express generalizations of various kinds, (ii) that they allow for exceptions to the generalization, and (iii) that they support inferences to “appropriate counterfactuals” (cf. Chapter 3).

It has already been established above that sentences containing impersonally inter-preted personal pronouns fit the first central property of generic sentences. They also comply with the second central property—allowing for exceptions—since the speaker in (4) could follow-up his remark with a sentence like(6).

(6) Das this

k¨onnen can

h¨ochstens at-most

Supermodels.

supermodels

‘Only supermodels can do that, if at all.’

With this follow-up, the speaker would state that he considers supermodels to be legitimate exceptions to the rule that he expresses in (4). The role of exceptions in generic sentences is further elaborated in Chapter 3.

The third characteristic property can be used as an easy test for genericity since it differentiates between generic sentences and sentences expressing “accidental

generaliza-9Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) provide a detailed data discussion and a descriptive analysis of the non-referential uses of the English first and second person pronounsI,you, andwe. They distinguish two types of non-referential uses: an impersonal use and a vague use. Personal pronouns that have an impersonal use, they argue, include you (singular), we, andI (see comments below). This use is restricted to sentences that express generalizations on people. The availability of a vague use does not coincide with the availability of an impersonal use. Vague uses can be found with you (plural),we, andthey, and thus seem to be connected to semantic plurality.

tions”. For instance, from the generic sentence about lions in(7-a), the counterfactual in(7-b) can be inferred.

(7) a. Lions have bushy tails.

b. If Chester the hamster were a lion, he would have a bushy tail.

In contrast, generalizations expressed by universal quantification over actual individuals do not have this property;(8-b) cannot be inferred from(8-a).

(8) a. Every student in this class has blond hair.

b. If Peter were a student in this class, he would have blond hair.

Universal quantification over actual individuals expresses accidental generalizations.

For accidental generalizations, the fact that a predicate applies to all individuals of a certain set is not the result of an underlying rule or norm. In other words, things might have been different (cf.Drewery 1998). This clashes with the possibility to infer appropriate counterfactuals.

Sentences containing impersonally used ich anddu express generalizations that sup-port counterfactual inferences, e.g.(9-a) supports (9-b) and (10-a) supports(10-b).¹⁰ (9) a. Ich

‘A migrant always has to be better than the locals to persist there.’¹¹ b. Wenn

‘If Peter were a migrant, he would (also) have to be better than the locals to persist there.’

‘A woman can’t expect every guy to chase after her.’¹²

10Gruber (2011) shows that counterfactual inferences that are supported by sentences containing impersonally useddu are available for the addressee, and concludes that there is still a hypothetical connection to the addressee in this use. However, as example(10-b)shows, availability of counterfac-tual inferences for the addressee is part of a more general property of generic sentences. The special connection to the addressee perceived for impersonally used du is pragmatic in nature (cf. Section 1.4).

11http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2037399,00.html

12 http://forum.gofeminin.de/forum/couple1/__f64874_couple1-Wie-kann-ich-ihm-zeigen-dass-ich-ihn-wirklich-mag-razz-AMOUR.html#698995

b. Wenn

‘If Peter were a woman, he also could not expect that every guy chases after him.’

The connection with genericity has also been noted for impersonally used second person singular pronouns in other languages, cf. e.g. Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) and Malamud (2006, 2007) for English impersonally usedyou, as illustrated in (11).

(11) Two hundred years ago, you used to go into the forest when you wanted fire-wood for yourself.

(Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990:744)

Example (11) is most naturally interpreted as involving an impersonal use of you:

‘Two hundred years prior, people in general used to go collect firewood’. That is, the sentence expresses a general statement about people that lived two hundred years before. It can be easily checked that also (11) allows for exceptions, and supports appropriate counterfactuals.

The strict link between the impersonal readings of personal pronouns and generic sentences places clear restrictions on the availability of impersonal readings: sentences containing an impersonally interpreted personal pronoun cannot report singular, spe-cific incidents, actions, situations, or circumstances. That is, these sentences cannot express episodic statements. Consequently, in episodic statements only the referen-tial use of personal pronouns is available.¹³ Consider example (12) for German, and example (13) for English personal pronouns.

(12) a. Gestern

Only available: ‘Yesterday at six o’clock, I milked my cows.’

b. Gestern

Only available: ‘Yesterday at six o’clock, you (addr.) milked your cows.’

(13) Yesterday at six o’clock, you milked your cows. (only addr.) Note that German verbal morphology does not distinguish episodic statements from generic statements.¹⁴

13In the translations, I give the intended interpretation of second person you in parentheses. The referential reading is marked by postposed ‘(addr.)’, and the impersonal reading is marked by ‘(imp.)’.

14Cf. Dahl(1995) for a cross-linguistic investigation of temporal and aspectual marking of episodic statements in contrast to generic statements.

(14) a. Peter Peter

isst eats

Essiggurken.

pickles b. Peter

Peter hat has

Essiggurken pickles

gegessen.

eaten

Example (14-a) can be used to describe a current, single situation in which Peter is eating pickles. But it can also be understood as a general statement about Peter, i.e.

that Peter has the habit of eating pickles, or that he does not object to eating pickles.

The same can be observed for the variant for which essen (Engl. ‘eat’) is in perfect tense in example(14-b). This sentence can be used to state that there was a particular situation in which Peter was eating pickles in the past. But it can again also express that Peter had the habit of eating pickles, or did not object to eat pickles at some point in the past.

Hence for German, looking at the verb form alone is insufficient for spotting imper-sonal uses. Certain linguistic material may tip the scale in one or the other direction, e.g. temporal and spatial expressions denoting specific times and places, cf. Section1.3.

For sentences without overt modifiers, as(14-a)and(14-b), however, it can only be de-termined contextually whether they express episodic or generic statements. Regarding specific data, this means that sometimes the only possibility to classify an occurrence of first or second person singular pronouns as impersonal or referential is to rely on speaker intuitions regarding the intended use.

One final note has to be made regarding impersonal readings of first person singular pronouns. As discussed in the Introduction, Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) argue for an impersonal reading for English first person singular I. This is a surprising claim since it is usually assumed that English I is a pure indexical in the sense of Kaplan (1978 [1989]), i.e. that no other reading apart from the speaker-referential reading exist.

Kitagawa and Lehrer give the following example to support their claim.

(15) We form a frame of script for this kind of situation. . . . Thus, in order to be able to take the subway in New York I simply need a ‘taking the subway’ script or frame, if I have one, and supply now relevant specific information about the situation.

(Kitagawa and Lehrer 1990:741, shortened)

If this example indeed illustrates a genuine impersonal use for English I, it is much more restricted and rare than the impersonal use of German first person singularich.

For any of the German examples it seems to be the case that when they are translated literally into English, the translations come out as uniformly speaker referential. In fact, Kitagawa and Lehrer(1990:741f) suggest that impersonally usedI is only available in

very specific contexts, i.e. in hypothetical contexts such as the one in (15).¹⁵ Given its unclear status, I leave aside the potential impersonal reading ofI throughout this thesis, and focus mainly on German impersonally used ich and du and English impersonally used you.

To summarize the central points of this subsection: Sentences containing imperson-ally used ich and du express general statements, rules, norms, and generalizations of other kinds. They share this property with sentences containing impersonally used personal pronouns in other languages. Since sentences of this kind not only allow for exceptions, but also support inferences to appropriate counterfactuals, they need to be grouped with and analyzed as generic sentences.

Im Dokument Impersonally Interpreted Personal Pronouns (Seite 29-34)