Hostname: page-component-5cf477f64f-mgq6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-04T01:09:52.064Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What We Can Learn from Using a Visual Questionnaire to Investigate Dutch and Afrikaans Impersonal Strategies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2025

Adri Breed Open the ORCID record for Adri Breed [Opens in a new window]  and
Daniel Van Olmen Open the ORCID record for Daniel Van Olmen [Opens in a new window]
Adri Breed*
Affiliation:
School of Languages, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa
Daniel Van Olmen
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
*
Corresponding author: Adri Breed; email: adri.breed@nwu.ac.za
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The topic of impersonalization has received a lot of attention in the literature, but the focus has mostly been on a limited number of strategies, such as the use of personal and indefinite pronouns and passive constructions. Impersonal strategies have thus far been examined using: (i) grammars, (ii) corpora, and (iii) language-based questionnaires. These methods suffer from several shortcomings if one wants to study the range of impersonal strategies. The present article aims to argue for a new way of investigating impersonal strategies that complements the other approaches, by reporting on the results of a visual questionnaire. More precisely, it discusses a visual questionnaire completed by speakers of Dutch and Afrikaans to determine whether this method is a satisfactory way of studying impersonal strategies and to also examine and compare the impersonal strategies of the two languages.*

Keywords

impersonalimpersonalizationimpersonal strategiesvisual questionnairehuman impersonal pronounsuniversalexistential
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2025 , pp. 35 - 63
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for Germanic Linguistics

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and constructive comments, which have significantly improved our article. We also wish to express our gratitude to our colleague from North-West University Graphic Design, Jo-Ann Chan, for her invaluable contribution to the design of the visual questionnaire. We furthermore want to give recognition to the artists who produced the visual stimuli: Carla Krugel, Christi Ferreira, Deone Rabe, Diane Pretorius, Drikus Roets, Elani du Preez, Eugene Marais, Gretchen Crots, Lache Oosthuizen, Natasha Nel, Nico Botma, Sonja Viviers, Tanya van Deventer, Tian Nigrini, and Waldo Raats. Finally, we would like to acknowledge, for their financial support of the project, South Africa’s National Research Foundation and the two language research entities of the North-West University, the Research Unit for Language and Literature in the South African Context and UPSET (Understanding & Processing Language in Complex Settings).

References

Arif, Marina Mohd & Hashim, Fatimah. 2008. Reading from the wordless: A case study on the use of wordless picture books. English Language Teaching 1, 121–126.Google Scholar
Bauer, Anastasia. 2021. Impersonalization in Slavic: A corpus-based study of impersonalization strategies in six Slavic languages. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 29, 123–178.Google Scholar
Breed, Adri, Chan, Jo-Ann, & Van Olmen, Daniël. 2021a. Developing and validating a visual questionnaire for the study of impersonalisation strategies: A design thinking approach. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 39, 152–76.Google Scholar
Breed, Adri, Van Olmen, Daniël, & Chan, Jo-Ann. 2021b. Onverpersoonlikingstrategieë in Afrikaans Impersonalisation strategies in Afrikaans. Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 61, 1079–1111.Google Scholar
Coussé, Evie & van der Auwera, Johan. 2012. Human impersonal pronouns in Swedish and Dutch: A contrastive study of man and men . Languages in Contrast 12, 121–138.Google Scholar
Egerland, Verner. 2003. Impersonal pronouns in Scandinavian and Romance. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 71, 75–112 Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University.Google Scholar
Garcia, Brigitte, Sallandre, Marie-Anne, L’Huillier, Marie-Thérèse, & Aksen, Hatice. 2018. Impersonal human reference in French Sign Language (LSF). Sign Language and Linguistics 21, 307–333.Google Scholar
Gast, Volker. 2015. On the use of translation corpora in contrastive linguistics: A case study of impersonalization in English and German. Languages in Contrast 15(1), 4–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gast, Volker & van der Auwera, Johan. 2013. Towards a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns, based on data from European languages. In Bakker, Dik & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), Languages across boundaries: Studies in the memory of Anna Siewierska, 119–58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groenen, Groenen. 2021. Hoe onpersoonlijk is persoonlijk?: Een contrastief corpusonderzoek van de Afrikaanse en Nederlandse persoonlijke voornaamwoorden jy/je en hulle/ze. MA dissertation, North-West University.Google Scholar
Haas, Florian. 2018. Changing human impersonal pronouns in English: A corpus study. Paper presented at Societas Linguistica Europaea 51, August, Tallinn.Google Scholar
Hoekstra, Jarich. 2010. On the impersonal pronoun men in Modern West Frisian. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 13, 31–59.Google Scholar
Horwat, Jeff. 2018. Too subtle for words: Doing wordless narrative research. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal 3, 172–195.Google Scholar
Kirsten, Johanita. 2016. Grammatikale Verandering in Afrikaans van 1911–2010. PhD dissertation, North-West University.Google Scholar
Kitagawa, Chisato & Lehrer, Adrienne. 1990. Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 14, 739–759.Google Scholar
Luukka, Minna-Riitta & Markkanen, Raija. 1997. Impersonalisation as a form of hedging. In Markkanen, Raija & Schröder, Hartmut (eds.), Hedging and discourse: Approaches to the analysis of a pragmatic phenomenon in academic texts (Research in Text Theory 24), 168–187. Berlin: De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Malchukov, Andrej L. & Siewierska, Anna. 2015. Impersonal constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Marin-Arrese, Juana, Martínez-Caro, Elena, & Pérez de Ayala Becerril, Soledad. 2001. A corpus study of impersonalisation strategies in newspaper discourse in English and Spanish. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2001 Conference, March 29 –April 2, 2001, Lancaster University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language.Google Scholar
Mazzitelli, Lidia Federica. 2019. Referential and pragmatic-discourse properties of Lithuanian reference impersonals: 2sg-imp, 3-imp and ma/ta-imp. Kalbotyra 72, 32–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nodelman, Perry. 1990. Words about pictures. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Prenner, Maria Katarzyna & Bunčić, Daniel. 2021. The competition of ARB constructions in Polish. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 29(2), 201–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Primus, Beatrice. 2011. Animacy and telicity: Semantic constraints on impersonal passives. Lingua 121, 80–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sansò, Andrea & Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 2007. The spread and decline of indefinite man-strategies in European languages. An areal perspective. In Ramat, Paolo & Roma, Elisa (eds.), Europe and the Mediterranean as linguistic areas: Convergencies from a historical and typological perspective, 95–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schlund, Katrin. 2018. A unifying approach to impersonality in Russian. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 63(1), 120–168.Google Scholar
Schlund, Katrin. 2020. Active transitive impersonals in Slavic and beyond: A parallel corpus analysis. Russian Linguistics 44, 39–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna 2008. Ways of impersonalising: Pronominal vs verbal strategies. In González, María de los Ángeles Gómez, Lachlan Mackenzie, J. & González Álvarez, Elsa M. (eds.), Current trends in contrastive linguistics: Functional and cognitive perspectives, 3–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna & Papastathi, Maria. 2011. Towards a typology of third person plural impersonals. Linguistics 49, 575–610.Google Scholar
Van Olmen, Daniël & Breed, Adri. 2018a. Human impersonal pronouns in Afrikaans: A double questionnaire-based study. Language Sciences 69, 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Olmen, Daniël & Breed, Adri. 2018b. Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic: A questionnaire-based comparative study of Afrikaans, Dutch and English. Studies in Language 42, 798–846.Google Scholar
Van Olmen, Daniël, Breed, Adri, & Verhoeven, Ben. 2019. A corpus-based study of the human impersonal pronoun (’n) mens in Afrikaans. Languages in Contrast 19, 79–105.Google Scholar
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zobel, Sarah. 2015. A pragmatic analysis of German impersonally used first person singular ‘ICH’. In De Cock, Barbara & Kluge, Bettina (eds.), The referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences, special issue of Pragmatics 26, 379–416.Google Scholar