Impersonal Uses of Personal Pronouns

Discussion questions and critical review of this article (download):

@article {kitagawa.ch+:1990:impersonal-personal,
    author = {Kitagawa, Chisato and Lehrer, Adrienne},
    date = {1990},
    journaltitle = {Journal of Pragmatics},
    number = {5},
    pages = {739–759},
    title = {Impersonal Uses of Personal Pronouns},
    volume = {14},
}

Discussion questions

• The article deals with synchrony, but the situation of personal pronouns being used impersonally seems to have the seeds for language change: how common is it for a personal pronoun, say 2 which is used also impersonally, to be re-interpreted as a purely impersonal pronoun? The other direction (on taking over the function of nous) is briefly mentioned in the article. Heine and Song (2011) touch upon the development of impersonal pronouns only briefly.

• The last part, explaining why some ‘closed set’ languages exhibit impersonal 2 (and why some don’t) is admittedly lacking. Since this article is from 1990, are there newer articles or books regarding this?

• The article mentions only two languages of the ‘open-ended’ type: Japanese and Korean. What other languages share the same relevant features? Do these features correlate with other features?

Critical review

Summary

This article deals with the ‘complement’ of our course’s topic, the impersonal; specifically, using linguistic elements whose primary function is personal (2 and 1) non-referentially, impersonally.

1. Introduction. Sociopragmatics: more attention was given to other issues (such as the use of tu:vous). This article discusses phenomena of a semantic-pragmatic nature. A case of person shift in French (on > 1pl, with tu/vous filling the gap of the impersonal). Impersonal use of personal pronouns is widespread.

2. Impersonal use of personal pronouns: a characterization. The situation in English. Impersonal you, which is less formal than one; impersonal we; impersonal I.

3. Contrasting impersonal and vague uses of personal pronouns. Distinguishing between truly impersonal usage and vague, non-concrete, usage. Five features of impersonal you, not shared with vague you.

   1. Vague ‘you’. Examples for the structural difference between impersonal and vague you.
   2. Number feature. While you and your do not distinguish number, the reflexive yourself/yourselves do. Only the singular is used impersonally.
   3. ‘We’. Borderline cases of impersonal:vague. The rhetoric force of person choice.
   4. 3rd person pronouns. May be vague but never impersonal.

4. Structural knowledge and life drama. Functional types of impersonal you:

   • ‘structural knowledge’ (conveying knowledge of how things work), with subtypes:
     • ‘situational insertion’ (the speaker ‘assimilating’ xemself to a wider class of people)
     • ‘moral and truism formulation’
   • ‘life drama’ (a short episode of special second person narrative)

   These two differ structurally (replaceability by one, use of tense/aspect, etc.).

5. Role distinctions. Impersonal you:I:we and the rhetoric force of the choice between them, described within a ‘person-deixis’ framework. The reason for the informality/camaraderie of the informal second person: it implies the speaker and the hearer both share the same perspective. Impersonal I does not imply this and thus is a more ‘safe’ choice in some sociopragmatic situations.

6. Typological differences among languages. A general pattern (verbatim): the extension of the 2nd person pronoun to an impersonal is possible only in language with small, closed pronoun sets. Examples from such languages and a short discussion. This is in contrast with languages like Japanese and Korean, which are open-ended with respect to personal pronouns and whose lexical ‘person’ markers are too semantically and pragmatically loaded to be generalized or used impersonally.

Critical assessment

• The use of of structural linguistic terminology and concepts is very apt in my opinion. The notion of the ability to replace or substitute linguistic elements with others in ceteris paribus as a part of their structural definition and identity is employed throughout the article, be it simple (such as replacing you by one, or by we or I) or more complex (such as the ‘indirect quotation test’). As a quite short, general article, it does use real examples (in addition to made-up ones) but these examples are used for exemplifying general ideas and are not representatives of types derived from a corpus study using a well-defined corpus (homogeneous, or inhomogeneous with due ‘precautions’).

• In more than one occasion it is not clear whether a statement or argumentation uses English as some meta-language conveying certain constructions and features shared by other languages as well, or describing and arguing concerning English per se.

• I think it would be better to group the characteristics of the impersonal you according to types (semantic: (5d); pragmatic: (5a); formal: (5b), (5c), (5e)), rather than giving them in a mixed order.

• The article gives nine ‘closed set’ languages, all having impersonal second person pronoun, but only two ‘open-ended’ languages: Japanese and Korean. Examples of more ‘open-ended’ languages would both make things clearer and strengthen the argumentation. A relevant feature both Japanese and Korean share but was not mentioned in the article is the lack of person marking morphology (in the verb or elsewhere). While it is not a sufficient condition, it might be a necessary one for such an ‘open-ended’ language. Malayāḷam (Southern Dravidian; Kerala) seems to be somewhere in between the two groups, but this is only my superficial impression since I am not familiar enough with it.

• The singularity of impersonal 2 (§3.2) describes English, but not Welsh, which do use impersonal 2pl (chi); for example (Harry Potter 1, ch. 6):

  ‘You’ve already seen him, Ginny, and the poor boy isn’t something you goggle at in a zoo. […]

  ‘Ti wedi’i weld o’n barod, Ginny, ac nid rhywbeth ’dach chi’n llygadrythu arno mewn sw ydi’r hogyn druan. […]

  So do Hebrew; a made-up example:

  • הרי כשבאים אליכם אורחים, אתם מסדרים את הבית לפני
  • harej kše-baim elejxem orxim, atem mesadrim et ha-bajit lifney
  • ‘naturally when guests come to you-pl.masc, you-pl.masc clean up the house before (they come)’)

• A side note concerning p. 755: once Eitan mentioned in one class a case in which two Hebrew-speaking women talked about pregnancy, one saying to the other a sentence beginning with:

  • אז כשאתה בהריון […]
  • az kše-ata be-herajon […]
  • ‘so when you-sg.masc are pregnant […]’

  This (not including Yuval...) is a par excellence example of the impersonality of this pronoun in a language with strict gender marking.