Resumen de Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic: A questionnaire-based comparative study of Afrikaans, Dutch and English
In this article, we examine and compare the main human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. Thesecond person singular, the third person plural and the ‘man’- and ‘one’-pronouns are studied by means of an acceptabilityjudgment questionnaire and a completion questionnaire. The combination of the two methods reveals interesting descriptive factsabout the three West Germanic languages. They include, among other things, the ‘man’-prominence of Afrikaans versus the‘you’-prominence of Dutch and English for expressing the universal meaning ‘anyone’ and the more prominent position of ‘they’ inDutch than in the other languages for conveying the existential meaning ‘someone, some people’. Our findings have a number of moretheoretical implications too. The two existing semantic maps for human impersonal pronouns make different distinctions in theexistential domain, based on type/level of (un)knownness on the one hand and number on the other. Our study tests both sets ofdistinctions and shows that the two dimensions interact with each other in Afrikaans, Dutch and English. The results thus supporta recent proposal in the literature for a combined semantic map. The data from the completion questionnaire, finally, alsoindicates that existential uses prefer alternative forms of impersonalization to human impersonal pronouns in all threelanguages.
