Impersonal Pronouns and First-Person Perspective

Abstract

Impersonal pronouns are prototypically used in generic sentences to make generalizations about people. Yet they are unlike bare plural people or indefinite singular a person in that they exhibit a sensitivity to first-person perspective. This relationship can be seen in ( a) inferences of first-person experience associated with use of these pronouns, ( b) additional meaning components carried by impersonally used personal pronouns involving a presumption of empathy or (dis)agreement, and ( c) their interpretation in attitude reports, including referential dependency on the attitude holder and the de se/de re distinction. I survey recent findings on the perspectival interpretation of impersonal pronouns including English generic one, German man, French on, and Italian si, as well as impersonally used personal pronouns like English you and German ich and du. I end by identifying some common themes emerging from recent formal semantic analyses of impersonal pronouns. One of the key notions here is the treatment of impersonals as Heimian indefinites, which in generic contexts get bound by the generic operator.