Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Síða 48

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Lykilorð: ópersónuleg fornöfn, óákveðin fornöfn, hrappar, misræmi, samhengistenglar
Keywords: impersonal pronouns, imposters, agreement mismatch, context linkers

summary
‘Maður ‘man/one’, pronouns and imposters’
In this article, we discuss ‘pronominal’ uses of maður in Icelandic, including impersonal
uses (where it refers to people in general), and specific ‘personal’ uses (where it can refer
specifically to the speaker). We compare these uses to ‘imposters’, in the sense of Collins
and Postal (2012). Imposters are cases where, descriptively, there is a mismatch between
the form and interpretation of a noun phrase. Examples of imposters in Icelandic are given
in (i).
(i)a. Svona svona, elskan, pabbi er hér.
there there love Daddy is here
‘There there, sweetheart, Daddy (=speaker) is here.’
b. Hvað segir kallinn?
what says guy.the
‘How are you?’ (Lit. ‘What does the guy say?’)
In (i-a), pabbi ‘Daddy’ is formally 3rd person but interpreted as 1st person. In (i-b), kallinn
‘the guy’ is formally 3rd person but interpreted as grammatically 2nd person.
We make a number of observations, many of them novel, to show that pronominal
maður has a number of interesting properties that distinguishes it from both canonical
pronouns and imposters. We then discuss ‘pronominal imposters’ such as ‘nurse we’,
where a nurse says ‘How are we feeling today?’ and ‘we’ refers to the addressee. We draw
connections to the use of 3rd person reflexives in child-directed (and even pet-directed)
speech.
Einar Freyr Sigurðsson og Jim Wood48