Changing human impersonal pronouns in English: A corpus study

Abstract

Human impersonal pronouns introduce non-specific, often generic, participants into dis-course, avoiding the identification of specific individuals for different reasons. In contrast to many other European languages, English does not (anymore) possess an expression that is dedicated to the impersonal function. In this paper, I will present a corpus study that traces changes in the distribution of impersonal uses of the Modern English pronouns one, you, they and people (cf. [1]-[4]).
(1) Also when sleeping in woods one wakes very soon, […]. [ARCHER, 1957maca.f8b]
(2) You can’t understand a thing the bloody man says. [ARCHER, 1973trev.f8b]
(3) The workhouse where they put me. They beat you there like a drum. [ARCHER, 1979pomr.d8a]
(4) Well, you know, in spite of all, people do say he is clever. [ARCHER, 1899mart.d6b]
There is substantial work on impersonal reference in Old, Middle and Early Modern English (Fröhlich 1951, Meyer 1953, Jud-Schmid 1956, Rissanen 1997, and Seoane Posse 2000), and it is clear that the demise of the dedicated impersonal man in late Middle English has led to some degree of reorganization among the remaining forms and also with respect to the divi-sion of labour between the latter and the passive construction (Jud-Schmid 1956, van Gelderen 1997, Los 2009, and Light & Wallenberg 2015).
In order to trace more recent changes, all instances of one, you, they and people were ex-tracted from the ARCHER corpus (version 3.1, covering the period 1650 to 1999) and manu-ally coded as impersonal or personal. In addition to information about registers and dia-chronic stages, more specific lexical and morphosyntactic features of the data points have been identified in order to explore changes in usage conditions. These include the syntactic function of the pronoun and features of the clause, such as clause type, verb class and the presence of modal verbs. In addition, I categorized the semantics/pragmatics of each in-stance, checking whether the hearer was part of the group generalized over, whether the sentence described a generalizing or an episodic state of affairs and whether the speaker used the impersonal to hide self-reference behind an apparent generalization.
Quantitative analyses of the data indicate that a number of changes in frequency and usage conditions of human impersonal pronouns have taken place. Inter alia, it can be observed that the well-known unpopularity of impersonal one in American English is already visible in the 17th-century data. In both British and American English, the frequency of impersonal one and you has risen after 1850. In addition, those subtypes of impersonal you that deviate more from its canonical use (simulation and self-reference) have become more common in these later stages, too, possibly as a consequence of extralinguistic developments (cf. Niel-sen et al. 2009 on similar developments in Danish). In the last part of the talk, the English findings will be compared to what is known about the diachrony of impersonal strategies in other European languages.