Indeterminate pronoun
An indeterminate pronoun is a pronoun which can show a variety of readings depending on the type of sentence it occurs in. The term "indeterminate pronoun" originates in Kuroda's (1965) thesis and is typically used in reference to wh-indeterminates, which are pronouns which function as an interrogative pronoun in questions, yet come to have additional meanings with other grammatical operators.[1][2][3][4] For example, in Japanese, dare means 'who' in a constituent question like (1) formed with the question-forming operator no:
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(1) dare-ga who-NOM hashitta run.PST no? Q 'Who ran?' |
However, in a statement (2), in combination with the particle ka, dare 'who' acquires an existential 'someone' meaning:
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(2) dare-ka-ga who-PTCL-NOM hashitta run.PST 'Someone ran' |
With yet another particle -mo, dare 'who' expresses a universal meaning as in (3):[5]
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(3) dare-mo who-PTCL wakaru understand.PRES 'Everyone understands' |
Languages with wh-indeterminates are typologically very common,[3][6] and this is a characteristic of many language families such as Uralic, Turkic, Dravidian, and the Slavic sub-branch of Indo-European.[7] The syntactic and semantic properties of indeterminate pronouns and their interactions with different grammatical operators is a major topic within the study of the syntax-semantics interface.[8][9]
References
- Kuroda, S.Y. (1965). Generative Grammatical Studies in the Japanese Language (Thesis). MIT.
- The original sense of "indeterminate pronoun" in Kuroda (1965) is distinguishable from how to term is used in the literature following. Kuroda (p. 42-3) held any noun phrase which behaves like a logical variable to be an indeterminate.
- Kratzer, Angelika; Shimoyama, Junko (2002). "Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese". In Otsu, Yukio (ed.). The Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Tokyo: Hituzi Press. pp. 1–25.
- Dayal, Vaneeta (2016). Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 239.
- Mitrović, Moreno; Sauerland, Uli (2016). "Two conjunctions are better than one". Acta Linguistica Hungarica. Vol. 63, no. 4. pp. 471–494.
- Haspelmath, Martin (2013). "Indefinite Pronouns". In Dryer, Matthew S.; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Szabolcsi, Anna (2015). "What do quantifier particles do?". Linguistics and Philosophy. 38 (2): 159–204. doi:10.1007/s10988-015-9166-z.
- Shimoyama, Junko. WH-Constructions in Japanese (Thesis). University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
- Shimoyama, Junko (2006). "Indeterminate Phrase Quantification in Japanese". Natural Language Semantics. 14 (2): 139–173. doi:10.1007/s11050-006-0001-5.