The Pragmatics of Impersonal Constructions in English: An Experimental Study
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University of Iowa, Linguistics, United States
Context. This paper focuses on the pragmatic properties of several impersonal constructions in English: i) passive-voice structures with no by-phrases (i.e., agent-defocused passives), ii) impersonal uses of the 3PPL pronoun they in active-voice structures, iii) impersonal uses of the 2P pronoun you in active-voice structures and iv) active-voice structures with indefinite pronouns someone and one. Most of these constructions have been thoroughly studied (and described) from typological, syntactic, and semantic perspectives, with most approaches focusing on the lack of a referential subject as their unifying characteristic (Malchukov & Ogawa 2011, Siewierska 2008, Shibatani 1995). In addition, much of the literature appears to view passive-voice structures (e.g. agentless passives) as a primary agent-defocusing structure across languages, while impersonal uses of personal pronouns (they/you) are viewed as a domain of cross-linguistic variation. However, very little (in fact, none, to our knowledge) experimental work has been done on speakers’ acceptability judgments of impersonal constructions in experimentally manipulated pragmatic contexts. Our study attempts to redress this significant gap in ongoing (psycho-)linguistic research.
Goals. Our study has three goals. First, we investigate whether passives in English can be considered a ‘pragmatically global’ structure, a status that would suggest their acceptability in a wide range of pragmatic contexts. Second, we investigate whether impersonal uses of the 2P pronoun you and indefinite pronoun one are pragmatically equivalent in the so-called ‘(moral or social) generalization’ contexts, as suggested by Yule (1982), Kitagawa & Lehrer (1990), among others. Third, we ask whether acceptability of the 3PPL pronoun they is primarily triggered in contexts with a pragmatically implied ‘(anonymous) institutional agent.
Experiment. We used Qualtrics software to design an on-line task with three experimental conditions: i) impersonal-they condition, ii) impersonal-you/one condition and iii) passive-voice condition. Each condition includes four short dialogues between two people – Speaker A and Speaker B. Participants complete each dialogue by ranking three sentences that are presented as possible concluding lines for either Speaker A or Speaker B. Participants are instructed to consider the dialogues as spoken in informal contexts and to consider each of the three concluding lines in terms of ‘naturalness’, using a five-point scale, where 1 means ‘not natural at all’ and 5 means ‘most natural’, with intermediate values indicating various degrees of naturalness. Examples of dialogues for each experimental condition are given in (1-3). The dialogues and possible responses were presented on the same page; a five-button scale appeared under each response.
In addition, participants are told that for some dialogues only one of the responses could be ‘most natural’; for other dialogues, they may find all three responses as ‘most natural’; and for others, only two responses could be natural. However, for each dialogue, the experimental responses were designed to include one response that was pragmatically infelicitous.
Sixteen experimental dialogues were counterbalanced with twenty distractor dialogues that matched experimental dialogues in format but included structures with referential subjects only. Qualtrics also allowed us to measure several timing parameters for each response (e.g. overall time spent each dialogue, number of clicks per item, first click, etc.).
Participants. 45 native speakers of American English participated in the study (20 males and 25 females; ages 18-24). Each participant completed the task on a laptop computer. The experimental/distractor items were preceded by three practice (warm-up) dialogues with non-impersonal sentences as to-be-ranked responses (e.g. My car needs to be repaired/My car needs repaired/My car needs repairing).
Results. The time-per-item measure did not vary significantly across the experimental conditions (mean 38.4 sec./per dialogue for they-condition; mean 37.6 sec./per dialogue for passive-voice condition; and mean 30.5 sec./per dialogue for you/one-condition). Tables 1 and 2 present mean acceptability ratings in each experimental condition. (In Table 1, INST-AGT = pragmatically implied institutional agent and NON-I-AGT = pragmatically implied non-institutional agent.)
Results suggest that they-impersonals, you-impersonals, and someone-impersonals are in complementary distribution, with each structure having the highest acceptability ranking in a specific pragmatic context: (i) ‘institutional-agent’ context for they-subjects, (ii) ‘(social/moral) generalization’ context for you-subjects and (iii) ‘non-institutional agent’ context for someone-subjects. There is also strong evidence for high acceptability of passive-voice structures both with institutional and non-institutional pragmatic agents in specific situational contexts, suggesting some pragmatic flexibility. In ‘(social/moral) generalization’ contexts, passive voice structures had very low rankings.
Perhaps, unexpectedly, impersonals with one-subjects were ranked very low in ‘(moral/social) generalization’ contexts, suggesting that the structure might be viewed as either pragmatically incongruent with the spoken register or, possibly, even outdated. These findings have implications for second language teaching and second language acquisition. Our next step is to investigate the acquisition of impersonals by Japanese and Korean learners of English as a second language (Japanese and Korean do not allow personal pronouns you/they in impersonal contexts, but do have passive-voice structures). Based on our results, we predict that the passive-voice structure will be generalized across most pragmatic contexts.
References
Kitagawa, C. and A. Lehrer (1990). Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. In Journal of
Pragmatics (14): 739-759.
Malchukov, A. and A. Ogawa (2011). Toward a typology of impersonal constructions. In A.
Malchukov & A. Siewierska (eds.), Impersonal Constructions, 19-56. John Benjamins. Amsterdam.
Shibatani, M. (1985). Passive and related constructions: A prototype analysis. In Language (61):
821-848.
Siewierska, A. (2008). Introduction: Impersonalization: An agent-based vs. a subject-based
perspective. In A. Siewierska (ed.), Transactions of the Philological Society (106), 115-137.
Yule, G. (1982). Interpreting anaphora without identifying reference. In Journal of Semantics
(1): 315-322.
Keywords:
Impersonal pronouns,
pragmatics,
Acceptability judgments,
English as a second language,
American English
Conference:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.
Presentation Type:
Poster or Oral
Topic:
Experimental Pragmatics
Citation:
Gavruseva
E
(2018). The Pragmatics of Impersonal Constructions in English: An Experimental Study.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00045
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Received:
11 May 2018;
Published Online:
14 Dec 2018.
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Correspondence:
Dr. Elena Gavruseva, University of Iowa, Linguistics, Iowa City, IA, 52246, United States, elena-gavruseva@uiowa.edu