Nominal speech act structure: Evidence from the structural deficiency of impersonal pronouns
Elizabeth Ritter, Martina Wiltschko
July 2018
 

In this paper, we propose that there is a speech act structure in the nominal spine, just as there is in the clausal spine whose function is to encode what we do when we utter a nominal: i.e., we name, describe, or track individuals. Thus, speech act structure establishes a link between the discourse referent and the speech act situation. The evidence we discuss comes from nominals that lack this speech act structure, namely impersonal pronouns. We argue that impersonal pronouns have in common that they lack nominal speech act structure but are not otherwise a natural class: they vary in syntactic structure. Thus, we propose a novel formal typology of impersonal pronouns.
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Reference: lingbuzz/004114
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: under review
keywords: impersonal pronouns, nominal speech acts, speech act structure, syntax
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