Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T02:52:19.737Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Let's talk about you and me1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2014

HEDDE ZEIJLSTRA
HEDDE ZEIJLSTRA*
Affiliation:
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
*
Author's address:Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Department for English Philology, Käte-Hamburger-Weg 3, 37073, Göttingen, Germany[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A recent development in Dutch concerns the deictic interpretation of the second-person singular pronoun je, which may refer to the speaker only. In such examples the subject refers to the speaker – not the hearer – but at the same time, these examples come along with an implicature stating that the hearer would have done the same thing if s/he were in the speaker's situation. Why is it the case that a second-person singular pronoun may refer to the speaker only? And why is it that when speaker-referring je is used, it always comes along with an implicature of the kind described above? In this article I argue that this behavior of Dutch je is a consequence of its semantically unmarked status with respect to the first-person singular pronoun ik. Along the lines of Sauerland (2008), I propose that Dutch je only carries one feature, [PARTICIPANT], whereas ik carries two features: [SPEAKER] and [PARTICIPANT]. Consequently, je may in principle refer to all participants in the conversation, enabling je to refer to the speaker as well. The fact that je does not normally refer to the speaker but to the hearer only then follows as some kind of blocking effect resulting from application of the principle of Maximize Presupposition. The paper concludes by spelling out the predictions that this analysis makes for the cross-linguistic variation with respect to the readings that participant and other pronouns may yield.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 465 - 500
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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

[1]

Earlier versions of this work have been presented at the workshop on Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of Agreement (Harvard), the 18th International Conference on Linguistics (Seoul), the workshop ‘Between you and me’: Local Pronouns across Modalities (RU Nijmegen), and the workshop Pronouns and Perspective in Language and Literature (NIAS, Wassenaar). I am much indebted to Suzanne Aalberse, Regine Eckardt, Rachael Garcia, Sabine Iatridou, Marije Michel, Sarah Zobel, and three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees for valuable comments and help. All errors, of course, are mine.

References

REFERENCES

Aalberse, Suzanne. 2009. Inflectional economy and politeness: Morphology-internal and morphology-external factors in the loss of second person marking in Dutch. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Ackema, Peter & Neeleman, Ad. 2003. Context-sensitive spell-out. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21.4, 681–735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Appel, René. 1993. Niet alleen voetballers gebruiken vaak “je” als ze “ik” bedoelen. In Thije, Jan ten (ed.), “Waar komen de juiste ideeën vandaan?” Opstellen over taal, wetenschap en maatschappij. Feestboek voor Gerard Hubers, 98–99. Amsterdam: Instituut voor Algemene Taalwetenschap, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Bennis, Hans, Cornips, Leonie & van Oostendorp, Mark. 2004. Verandering en verloedering: Normen en waarden in het Nederlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/Salomé.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Culicover, Peter W. & Jackendoff, Ray. 1997. Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry 28.2, 195–218.Google Scholar
Egerland, Verner. 2003. Impersonal man and aspect in Swedish. Venice Working Papers in Linguistics 13, 71–91.Google Scholar
Giacalone Ramat, Anna & Sansò, Andrea. 2007. The spread and decline of indefinite man-constructions 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 & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. Language universals. Den Haag: Mouton.Google Scholar
Harbour, Daniel, Adger, David & Béjar, Susana (eds.). 2008. Phi theory: Phi-features across modules and interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Ritter, Elizabeth. 2002. A feature-geometric analysis of person and number. Language 78, 482–526.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heim, Irene. 1991. Artikel und Definitheit. In von Stechow, Arnim & Wunderlich, Dieter (eds.), Semantik: Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, 487–535. Berlin: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heim, Irene. 2008. Features on bound pronouns. In Harbour, et al. (eds.), 35–56.Google Scholar
Hyman, Eric. 2004. The indefinite you. English Studies 85.2, 161–176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ippolito, Michaela. 2003. Presuppositions and implicatures in counterfactuals. Natural Language Semantics 11.2, 145–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klaasse, Betty. 2005. Spreek voor jezelf. Veranderingen in het gebruik van persoonlijke voornaamwoorden met een algemene referentie in taalvergelijkend perspectief. M.A. thesis, University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Koeneman, Olaf & Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2014. One law for the rich and another for the poor: The Rich Agreement hypothesis rehabilitated. Linguistic Inquiry 45, 571–615.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 1997. German impersonal pronouns and logophoricity, 15 pp. http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WViZTE1M/Impersonal%20Pronouns%20&%20Logophoricity.pdf (accessed 1 August 2013).Google Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika. 2009. Making a pronoun: Fake indexicals as windows into the properties of pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 40.2, 187–237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malamud, Sophia. 2005. Impersonal indexicals: you and man, si. Ms., Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Malamud, Sophia. 2006. Semantics and pragmatics of arbitrariness. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Moltmann, Friederike. 2006. Generic one, arbitrary PRO, and the first person. Natural Language Semantics 14.3, 257–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Onrust, Margreet. 1995. Voetbal-je. Tekstblad 3, 13–14.Google Scholar
Percus, Orin. 2006. Antipresuppositions. In Ueyama, Ayumi (ed.), Theoretical and empirical studies of reference and anaphora: Toward the establishment of generative grammar as an empirical science, 52–73. [Report of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), Project No. 15320052, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.]Google Scholar
Sauerland, Uli. 2003. A new semantics for number. In Young, Rob & Zhou, Yuping (eds.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13, 258–275. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.Google Scholar
Sauerland, Uli. 2008. On the semantic markedness of phi-features. In Harbour, et al. (eds.), 57–82.Google Scholar
Sauerland, Uli, Andersen, Jan & Yatsushiro, Kazuko. 2005. The plural is semantically unmarked. In Kepser, Stephan & Reis, Marga (eds.), Linguistic evidence, 413–434. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. 2011. Overlap and complementarity in reference impersonals: Man-constructions vs. third person plural-impersonals in the languages of Europe. In Malchukov, Andrej & Siewierska, Anna (eds.), Impersonal constructions: A cross-linguistic perspective, 57–89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tarenskeen, Sammie. 2010. From you to me (and back): The flexible meaning of the second person pronoun in Dutch. M.A. thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen.Google Scholar
Van Hout, Roeland. 2003. Hun zijn jongens: Ontstaan en verspreiding van het onderwerp hun. In Stroop, Jan (ed.), Waar gaat het Nederlands naar toe? Panorama van een taal, 276–286. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.Google Scholar
Van Wassenaar, Arent. 1994. Je = je, ik, we, men. Onze Taal 63, 203.Google Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2008. On the flexibility of formal features. In Biberauer, Theresa (ed.), The limits of syntactic variation, 143–173. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zobel, Sarah. 2010. Non-standard uses of German 1st person singular pronouns. In Nakakoji, Kumiyo, Murakami, Yohei & McCready, Eric (eds.), New frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 292–311. Berlin & Heidelberg: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar