Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Only one on ?

The presentation will propose a unified analysis of the french impersonal pronoun on. On has three readings: one personal (we) and two impersonals, an episodic one (=someone) and a generic one (people). The presentation will focus on those two last uses of on.

1. On dit merci (quand on est poli).                                (generic)

One says thank you (when one is polite).

1. On frappe à la porte.                                                        (episodic)

~ Someone knocks at the door.

They seem to show three different properties that could make one think that they are two different pronouns.

i. Scoping properties: generic and episodic ons are not interpreted in the same position at LF. Generic on scopes over the negation and episodic on scopes under the negation.

1. En mai, on ne pleure pas.

In May, people don’t cry.                                                (gen>¬)

1. Onn’a pas appelé cet après-midi

No one called this afternoon                                               (¬> ep)

ii. Binding: Generic on can bind 3sg possessives (5), while the bound reading sounds odd with episodic on (6).

1. On range ses affaires.

One tidies one’s stuff.                                                     (generic)

1. #On a rangé son vélo.

                   Intended: Someone put their bike away.                         (episodic)

iii. Inclusion of discourse participants: generic on is inclusive of the speaker and the hearer (7), while episodic on is always exclusive - in (8), on is never the speaker or the hearer.

1. On range ses affaires.

                     One tidies one’s stuff.                                                            (generic)         

1. On a volé un vélo.

       Someone stole a bike                                                              (episodic)

I argue that a single structure can account for all those differences. I propose that on is a very deficient pronoun, whose φP layer is composed of an empty person layer (πP) and a ClassP layer encoding a [+human] feature over the NP layer (9a), unlike the φP layer found with weak personal pronouns (9b).

1. a. [πP π[ClassP Class [+human][NP N]]]                              Partial/Minimal φP Layer

b. [NumP Num [πP π[ClassP Class[NP N]]]]                                 Full φP Layer

This structure accounts for the generic and episodic readings: on can be bound by sentential operators and are under their scope since they do not show scoping properties themselves. Looking at the type of sentence in which French on appears and the reading it gets in them, it seems that on cannot have a generic interpretation if it is not in a generic sentence independently —namely a sentence submitted to a generic operator (Krifka et al. 1995). Similarly, on only gets an episodic reading in an episodic sentence — namely a sentence that involves an existential quantifier over events (Bohnemeyer and Swift 2004). The generic operator applying over the whole sentence is then interpreted higher than the existential quantifier over events.

The difference of binding and inclusion/exclusion of the participants is the result of pragmatics and not of a difference in the structure: the underspecified meaning of on restricts the episodic contexts in which it can be used. The speaker needs to be clueless about the referent’s identity. To have a bound possessive, its relation to on has to be obvious, which explains why it’s easier with generic sentences than with episodic ones. The ignorance of the speaker about on’s referent is improbable if they speak about oneself or the addressee, leading to the exclusion of 1^st and 2^nd persons in episodic on. Generic sentences do not involve such a pragmatic restriction, leading to this semantic asymmetry.

This proposal leaves some points for discussion: it does not take in account impersonal pronouns in other languages, like English one that has different properties, like not being possible in episodic sentences. It also does not explain the 1^st person reading of on, that morphosyntactically behaves like impersonal on, but is interpreted as a 1^st plural in binding and possessives.

References. Ackema, P., Neeleman, A. (2018). Features of person: from the inventory of persons to their morphological realization (vol. 78). Mit press.; Bohnemeyer, J., Swift, M. (2004). Event realization and default aspect. Linguistics and philosophy, 27, 263-296.; Cardinaletti, A., Starke, M. (1999). The typology of structural deficiency: a case study of the three classes of pronouns. Empirical approaches to language typology, 145-234.; Déchaine, R.-M., Wiltschko, M. (2002). Decomposing pronouns, Linguistic Inquiry, 33(3), 409-442.; Egerland, V. (2003). Impersonal pronouns in scandinavian and romance, 71, 75-102. Working papers in scandinavian syntax.; Fenger, P. (2017). How impersonal does one get? A study of man-pronouns in germanic. The journal of comparative germanic linguistics, 21(3), 291-325.; Krifka, M., Pelletier, F. J., Carlson, G., Meulen, A., Chierchia, G., Link, G. (1995). Genericity: an introduction. In Carlson, G. N. & Pelletier F. J., the generic book. University of chicago press. 1-124.; Smith, P. (2021) morphology-semantics mismatches and the nature of grammatical features. Berlin, boston: de gruyter mouton.