Towards a typology of third person plural impersonals

Abstract

Although third person plural impersonal constructions (3pl IMPs) are widely attested crosslinguistically, they have not yet been the main subject of a typological study. This paper aims to establish the basis for such a study by applying a tentative but rather elaborate typology of 3pl IMPs, developed by Cabredo Hofherr (Arbitrary readings of third person pronominals: 81–94, 2003, “Arbitrary” pro and the theory of pro-drop, Oxford University Press, 2006), to a sample of European languages. The typology recognizes as many as five different types of impersonal uses of the 3pl: a) the universal, b) corporate, c) vague, d) inferential and e) specific. This typology is tested on the basis of ten European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) using data stemming from a parallel translation corpus of Harry Potter and also acceptability judgments elicited from speakers by means of a questionnaire. The investigation reveals that while all the languages in the sample have universal, corporate and vague 3pl IMPs, the specific are at best marginal in English, Dutch, French, German and Polish, as are also the inferred in English, French and German. These findings are shown to correlate in part with the morphophonological realization of the 3pl IMP (as a free vs. a bound form), which may be interpreted as a reflection of the degree of grammaticalization of 3pl IMPs but also the result of the nature of the alternative impersonalizing constructions available among the relevant languages. The distribution of the five types of 3pl IMPs together with a sixth type is captured in the form of a preliminary semantic map, the nature of which requires substantiation by wider crosslinguistic data. The discussed typology of 3pl IMPs is found to be a promising basis for a wider typological investigation, provided a separate type of 3pl IMP involving the category of speech act verbs is included and the use of the 3pl for events which necessarily (not only contingently) involve singular individuals, nonhumans or alternatively the speech act participants are catered for.