Human Impersonal Pronoun Uses in English, Dutch and German

Abstract

The pronoun man derives from the homophonous noun meaning ‘man’. English had such a pronoun, but it disappeared in the 15 th century (Rissanen 1997: 517–521), so Modern English does not have a ‘man’ strategy for impersonal reference. Conversely, German, at least in the written register, very rarely uses a ‘you’ strategy of the type illustrated in (1). Dutch would seem to have both a ‘man’ and a ‘you’ strategy: 1