Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages
Volker Gast, Johan van der Auwera · 2013
Human impersonal pronouns like French on and German man are regarded as pronouns that are used to fill an argument position with a variable ranging over human referents without establishing a referential link to an entity from the universe of discourse. Such pronouns are highly context-dependent and variable in their distributional and semantic properties. Following up on work done by Anna Siewierska, we aim to capture this variability by using the semantic map methodology. We propose a mathematical (graph-theoretic) definition of ‘connectvity maps’ in general and devise a map for human impersonal pronouns or, more generally speaking, the ‘impersonalization’ of argument positions. The map is intended as a hypothesis about possible patterns of polysemy in the domain of investigation, and is tested on the basis of a small sample of European languages.