Imposters: A Study of Pronominal Agreement

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. This usage is hardly novel or particular to (modern) English. Jespersen (1924, 217) remarked, “Caesar . . . in his commentaries throughout uses Caesar instead of the first pronoun.” Elsewhere (Jespersen 1961b, 127) he pointed out, “Occasionally a speaker uses his own name instead of the pronoun ‘I’; thus in Sh Caesar and Othello often, by commentators taken as a sign of their pride.” Moreover, names can be used as 2nd person imposters. On a recently broadcast true crime program, a detective said to a female suspect named Roxanne, “You’ve got to look out for Roxanne.” 2. The usage was of course traditionally noted; see Jespersen 1924, 217. Despite its special features, yours truly offers one enormous advantage to the study of imposters lacked by other English forms: it has no sentential use except as an imposter, making searching for Internet examples relatively easy. With others, one typically has to sort through enormous numbers of occurrences to find one that is unambiguously an imposter. 3. Actually, this claim is a bit too strong, as in the case of plural imposters there is no way to tell apart 1st person and 3rd person verbal agreement. (i) They/We/The present authors are professionals. We assume uniform 3rd person agreement on simplicity (generality) grounds. 4. Jespersen here mischaracterizes the expression number one. This is not limited to being a “substitute for” I—that is, in our terms, to being a 1st person singular imposter. See the discussion in chapter 15. 5. While bibi is arguably an imposter, the other two forms—mézigue and tézigue—most likely fall under the category of camouflage structures, a construction type considered in Collins, Moody, and Postal 2008 and in chapters 6 and 17. 6. Phrases like we dancers, you lawyers are counterexamples. Their grammatical behavior is unexceptionally 1st person/2nd person plural. For example: (i) a. We dancers1 need to keep ourselves1/*themselves1 in good shape. b. You reporters1 tend to think you1/*they1 are well-informed, don’t you1/*they1? We do not attempt an analysis of such forms in this book. 234 Notes to Pages 7–22 7. Of course, a condition of use for members of the set in (14aiii) is that the addressee(s) be a child/children, and moreover, the child/children to whom the speaker bears the relation denoted by the term. This suggests inter alia that each involves a null instance of a 2nd person possessive. 8. The use of kinship terms as 1st person imposters is noted by Jespersen (1924, 217): “Still another case is found when grown-up people in talking to small children say ‘papa’ or ‘Aunt Mary’ instead of ‘I’ in order to be more easily understood.” 9. Jespersen (1924, 218) observes, “Similarly a lover may say my darling or my own girl instead of you.” Use of the second phrase as an imposter is though impossible in our English. Chapter 2 1. Areviewer suggests that Kripke’s well-known distinction between speaker reference and semantic reference might be able to account for the intended reference of imposters. Kripke (1977, 264) defines speaker’s reference as follows: (i) “We may tentatively define the speaker’s referent of a designator to be that object which the speaker wishes to talk about, on a given occasion, and believes fulfils the conditions for being the semantic referent of the designator.” In the case of the present authors used as an imposter, we are the objects that we wish to talk about in using the present authors and we believe that we are in fact the present authors (we fulfill the conditions for being the semantic referent of the present authors). This is basically a way of formulating the Notional View. 2. Siewierska’s note 2 observes that English 2nd person forms have a generic usage, where (ia,b) are equivalent on a particular reading. (i) a. You shouldn’t kick your dog. b. One shouldn’t kick one’s dog. We discuss this usage of you in chapter 18. 3. It is well-documented that in various contexts in certain natural languages—for example, Kannada (Dravidian) (Nadahalli 1998); Amharic (Schlenker 2003); Catalan Sign Language (Quer 2005); Navajo (Athapaskan) (Hale and Platero 2000); Slave (Rice 1989); Zazaki (Indo-Aryan) (Anand and Nevins 2004); Engenni (Kwa)—non– 3rd person pronominals are used to refer not to discourse participants but to the subjects or indirect objects of “world-creating” verbs. Chapter 3 1. John R. Ross (personal...