Towards a typology of human impersonal pronouns – TypoImpers

Corpus work (parallel translation corpora) Jena
Syntactic and semantic description and analysis in typologically varied languages (France): studies of Basque, Breton, Mauritian Creole have been done, studies of Catalan Sign Language and Maltese are on-going, studies of Cap Verdean Creole, Tseltal (Mayan), Tashlhiyt Berber, French Sign Language and Italian Sign Language are planned for the second part of the project.

The project has achieved the aims of the first part of the project. The project started with a Workshop on questionnaires in typological studies, on April 26 2012, in Jena. Our colleagues from the MPI in Leipzig shared their scientific and practical experiences from numerous questionnaire studies with us. Following up on this workshop the two teams developed a first version of an elicitation questionnaire for R-impersonal constructions, based on the studies of R-impersonals in Romance and Germanic. This questionnaire was then tested by both teams. The German colleagues conducted studies on the predictivity of different properties for translation equivalents in parallel translation corpora and conducted corpus work on Italian and Russian. The French side conducted syntactic and semantic studies of R-impersonal constructions in typologically diverse languages such as Basque, Breton, Mauritian Creole (M. Alleesaib, research assistant) and Catalan Sign Language (G. Barbera research assistant). We have shown that the Basque pronoun BAT «one« should not be analysed as an R-impersonal pronoun comparable to Spanish UNO but rather as a weak indefinite pronoun. We further showed that languages may allow more than one expression of 3pl to be used in R-impersonal contexts (Mauritian zot/ bann-la, German ze/ die). The results were presented at the project workshops in Bayonne (June 2012) and Jena (March 2013). The PIs of the project organised a Conference on impersonal pronouns in Sept 2011, before the ANR-DFG projet. Following up on this Conference the project organised an international Conference Impersonal Pronouns on No 8-9, 2012 in Paris.

Following from our first studies we have modified the first version of the questionnaire. The second version is now being tested, before the definitive version is translated into German, French, Spanish and Russian for work with informants in Eastern Europe, West Africa, Latin America and Russia.
The second part of the project has three main work-packages. First, we are developing the database that will be fed with data from 40 European languages based on the questionnaire.
The second aim concerns the detailed study with specialist colleagues of R-impersonal strategies in Maltese, Tashlhiyt Berber, Cap Verdean Creole, Tseltal, French Sign Language (LSF) and Italian Sign Language (LIS). Our results on Mauritian Creole, Basque and Catalan Sign Language will be submitted to international journals before the end of the project.
The third focus is on corpus work for French, Spanish, German and English in order to establish whether the classification of R-impersonals we adopt can account for the different readings found in the corpora.
We are preparing a Conference on R-impersonal pronouns for November 2014 (2 days with call for papers). C. Barberà will organise a Workshop in Sign Languages and R-impersonals in the autumn 2014, with M-T Lhuillier (UMR 7023), M-A Sallandre (UMR 7023), C. Geraci (I. Jean Nicod), M. Santoro (Paris), J. Quer (Barcelone), R. Pfau (Amsterdam) and M. Steinbach (Göttingen) as invited speakers. This Workshop is a follow-up on the Workshop on Sign Languages and Nominal Determination, held at the UMR 7023, Paris, in February 2013. As a member of the international projet SignGram (COST Action IS1006, PI J. Quer), G. Barberà will spend 2 weeks in Göttingen, collaborating with the local research group on German Sign Language. The collaboration beween the teams will be pursued with three project meetings: Project WS in Paris, 9-10 Dec 2013, WS Questionaires and Database, Jena Feb 2014 and a WS Finalising the Database, spring 2015 in Jena.

Publications and presentations of the French side of the project
1. Cabredo Hofherr (soumis juillet 2013) Impersonal passives. In: Martin Everaert & Henk Van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. Oxford : Blackwell.

Talks at conferences
1. Alleesaib & Cabredo Hofherr (2013) R-impersonal constructions in Mauritian. Summer meeting, Society of Pidgin & Creole languages, Lisbon, 19-21 Jun 2013
2. Alleesaib & Cabredo Hofherr (2013) R-impersonals in Mauritian Creole. Surrey Linguistic Circle, U. Surrey, 5 Jun 2013.
3. Alleesaib & Cabredo Hofherr (2013) R-impersonals in Mauritian. Berlin 2013 workshop of the GDRi The Structure, Emergence and Evolution of Pidgin and Creole Languages (SEEPiCLa), 29 May 2013.
4. Barberà & Quer (2013) Getting impersonal: Impersonal reference in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research. University College London. July 12.
5. Cabredo Hofherr (2013) Varieties of partial pro-drop. Summer meeting, Society of Pidgin and Creole languages, U. Lisbon, 19-21 Jun 2013
6. Cabredo Hofherr (2013) Comparing what isn’t there: the interpretation of null subjects. Surrey Linguistic Circle, 14 May 2013.
7. Cabredo Hofherr (2012) The terms inclusive and exclusive in studies of R-impersonals. Colloque Pronoms impersonnels, Paris, 8-9 nov 2012. (colloque international avec appel à communications)
8. Cabredo Hofherr (2012) The classification of R-impersonal readings. Seminar of the Projet C4 de l’SFB 833, Eberhard Karls-Universität, Tübingen, 31 Oct 2012.
9. Cabredo Hofherr & Etxeberria (2012) Impersonal 3pl and the pronoun bat in Basque. Colloque Pronoms impersonnels, Paris 9 nov 2012 (colloque international avec appel à communications)
18. Jouitteau & Rezac (2012) Breton impersonal forms. Colloque Pronoms impersonnels, Paris 9 Nov 2012
19. Jouitteau & Rezac (2012) Breton impersonal forms. 7th Celtic Linguistics Conference (CLC7), U. Rennes, 22-23 Jun 2012

Human impersonal pronouns such as Fr. on and Ge. man pose a number of challenges to descriptive linguistics as well as contemporary syntactic and semantic theories. They generalize over (sets of) human referents and background the argument position that they fill, thus having a semantic effect similar to that of relevant operations on argument structure like impersonal passives (e.g. Ge. Es wurde getanzt) and impersonal middles (e.g. Sp. Se habla español). A subset of the human impersonal pronouns can be interpreted more or less like existential indefinite pronouns such as Fr. quelqu’un and Ge. jemand, though they differ systematically from the latter in their semantic and syntactic properties.
This project investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of human impersonal pronouns such as Fr. on, Ge. man and Engl. one and compares them with impersonal uses of second person singular (tu/du/you) and third person plural pronouns (ils/sie/they). Based on a sample of forty European and twenty non-European languages we will develop a typology of human impersonal pronouns with the aim of formulating generalizations concerning the patterns and limits of variation in this domain. The crosslinguistic data collected will be made publicly available in an online database. On the semantic side, the project focuses on the interaction of impersonal pronouns with specific types of context (e.g. assertive vs. non-assertive, generic vs. episodic). On the syntactic side, it investigates the binding and agreement properties of human impersonal pronouns.
The project combines a crosslinguistic overview with detailed semantic and syntactic investigations to bridge the gap between accurate empirical research and contemporary theorizing in the domain of impersonals. More generally, the project aims to make a contribution to our understanding of the interaction between lexically and grammatically encoded information on the one hand, and information contributed by the context, on the other.