Temporal and atemporal uses of ‘you’: indexical and generic second person pronouns in English, German, and Dutch

Abstract

Second person singular pronouns are widely used in generic contexts, referring to people in general rather than to the single addressee of the utterance. Based on the assumption that pronouns are morphosyntactically complex elements, this paper argues that only pro-φPs in the sense of Déchaine and Wiltschko (2002) are licit in those environments while fully fledged pro-DPs are necessarily interpreted indexically. It is argued that the latter contain an interpretable but unvalued time-feature in D which restricts the interpretation of the entire structure to a specific temporal stage of the individual denoted by the pronoun. The article shows that in German, English, and Dutch this time-feature is valued by utterance time, thus leading to an indexical interpretation of the pronoun. From a broader perspective, the time-feature is proposed to be universally present in indexical pronouns. Ultimately, its properties are responsible for crosslinguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of first and second person pronouns.

You Can Help Us! The Impact of Formal and Informal Second-Person Pronouns on Monetary Donations

“…We suspect that in the generic context of charitable appeals, the difference in default reading between the two pronouns (generic for the informal pronoun je, but deictic for the formal pronoun u) may explain the difference in their effects, rather than their being informal or formal per se. However, as can be seen in Table 1 above, the informal slogan contained not only the informal pronoun je, which is easily given a generic reading, but also the strong (unreduced) second-person pronoun jij, which seems more likely to receive a deictic reading (Gruber 2017;de Hoop and Hogeweg 2014). To test whether the sentences in the experiment's slogans were more likely to receive a generic or a deictic interpretation, the next section reports on a small follow-up experiment we conducted in which the generic or deictic interpretation of the three types of second-person pronouns je, jij, and u was explicitly questioned (cf.…”

Nominal speech act structure: Evidence from the structural deficiency of impersonal pronouns

“…A first indication that it is indeed structurally deficient comes from differences in the interpretation possibilities of strong and weak 2 nd person pronouns in Dutch. As first discussed by Gruber (2013), the weak version may be interpreted as either a personal or an impersonal pronoun, but the strong version is necessarily personal, as illustrated below. …”