Séminaire de Recherche: Johan van der Auwera (U. Antwerp)

The impersonal pronouns of English, Dutch and German - Mar 16 NOv - 12h15 - L208

The impersonal of English are one, you, they and probably also people. (

1) a. One eats late in Spain.

b. You eats late in Spain.

c. They eat late in Spain.

d. People eat late in Spain.

The meanings of the four markers are not quite identical, and they all also have other uses. Dutch and German have similar sets of pronouns, partially using cognates, partially different elements, e.g. German man ‘man’ and die ‘those’.

(2) Was soll man dazu sagen?

what should man thereto say

‘What should one say to that?’

(3) Jetzt wollen die schon wieder die Steuern erhöhen.

now want those already again the taxes increase

‘Now they want to increase taxes again.’

This talk will offer a partially corpus‐based account for the different pronouns, their meanings and their uses (frequencies) in terms of a cross‐linguistic semantic map, related to the indefiniteness map of Haspelmath’s (1997).

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