The impersonal gets personal

Abstract

Multicultural London English (MLE) has developed a new pronoun, man, with a number of interesting properties. It can be interpreted as any person and number combination (1sg, 1pl, 2sg, 2pl, 3sg, 3pl), and at first blush appears the allow a generic impersonal reading. One central strand of analyses of the ‘generic’ or ‘quasi-universal’ interpretation of impersonal pronouns involves treating them as featurally impoverished pronouns which act as variables bound by a generic operator either high in the clause (Moltmann 2006; Sigurðsson and Egerland 2009, a.o.) or at the top of the DP (Ackema and Neeleman 2018). What is interesting about MLE man is that it seems to allow a generic reading while being generally resistant to binding: the pronoun never behaves as a bound variable, and so it could not reasonably be assumed that a generic operator can bind it. I show, however, that a closer look at the facts reveals that the quasi-generic interpretation, and all other possible interpretations of the pronoun, can be explained instead by assuming that it has a featureless person head, which introduces the full lattice of possible referents including speaker and addressee (following Harbour 2016), and then allowing contextually determined subsets of that full lattice to be picked out by a choice function, modelled on the epsilon operator of von Heusinger (2004). This novel data from MLE suggests that generic-like interpretations can arise even where generic binding is not possible, but that the traditional strategy of generating these interpretations are still needed to capture the full typology of impersonal pronouns.