A pragmatic analysis of german impersonally used first person singular ‘ICH’

Abstract

The German first and second person singular pronouns ichand duallow for a referential use and an impersonal use. In their impersonal use, both pronouns behave like the impersonal pronoun man(Engl. one) in generic sentences. I argue that the aspect of impersonally used singular personal pronouns that distinguishes them (i) from each other, (ii) from impersonal pronouns, and (iii) from “ordinary” generic sentences is their pragmatic effects. The semantic contribution of the three pronouns and their containing utterances is discussed before a comparative analysis of the pragmatic effects of impersonally used ichand duand impersonal manis given. The analyses are illustrated with naturally occurring data from a self-compiled data collection. Turning to a more practical topicin the second part of the paper, I discuss amethodological issue regarding corpus-based analyses of low-frequency phenomena,such as impersonally used ichin the second part of this paper by reporting a small-scale corpus study.