Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in Languages in contrast, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2022, pages: 1-42, © 2021 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - A questionnaire-based study of impersonalization in Romanian and English
T2 - With special attention to passivization
AU - Rădulescu, Valentin
AU - Van Olmen, Daniel
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in Languages in contrast, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2022, pages: 1-42, © 2021 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2022/1/31
Y1 - 2022/1/31
N2 - This paper is the first contrastive study of impersonalization in Romanian and English. Taking an acceptability judgment approach, we describe the functional potential in all impersonal uses of not only the pronouns ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ but also the lesser studied passive. We find inter alia: a similar division of labor in the languages between ‘you’ and ‘they’ for contexts paraphrasable as, respectively, ‘everyone’ and ‘someone/some people’; a wider range of uses for pro-dropped ‘they’ than for its overt counterpart, as hypothesized in previous research; and a preference in English, but not Romanian, for passives to ‘they’ especially in contexts like ‘they’ve stolen my wallet!’, where the referent is entirely unidentifiable and likely to be singular. Levels of identifiability and number, each of which has been suggested in a separate semantic map as necessary for capturing impersonalization, are also shown to interact, supporting a proposal to combine them in one map.
AB - This paper is the first contrastive study of impersonalization in Romanian and English. Taking an acceptability judgment approach, we describe the functional potential in all impersonal uses of not only the pronouns ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘they’ but also the lesser studied passive. We find inter alia: a similar division of labor in the languages between ‘you’ and ‘they’ for contexts paraphrasable as, respectively, ‘everyone’ and ‘someone/some people’; a wider range of uses for pro-dropped ‘they’ than for its overt counterpart, as hypothesized in previous research; and a preference in English, but not Romanian, for passives to ‘they’ especially in contexts like ‘they’ve stolen my wallet!’, where the referent is entirely unidentifiable and likely to be singular. Levels of identifiability and number, each of which has been suggested in a separate semantic map as necessary for capturing impersonalization, are also shown to interact, supporting a proposal to combine them in one map.
KW - pronoun
KW - semantic map
KW - passive
KW - impersonal
KW - English/Romanian
U2 - 10.1075/lic.20004.rad
DO - 10.1075/lic.20004.rad
M3 - Journal article
VL - 22
SP - 1
EP - 42
JO - Languages in Contrast
JF - Languages in Contrast
SN - 1387-6759
IS - 1
ER -