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On the feature (in)deficiency of dedicated impersonal pronouns: the view from Jordanian Arabic

Paper · 2022 · Mohammad Ali Alhailawani, Waleed Ahmad Othman and Osama Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Ghafer

Summary

The paper tests a common assumption about dedicated impersonal pronouns such as English one and Dutch men: that they carry no person, number or gender features in the syntax. The authors examine Jordanian Arabic (JA), where the numeral waaħad ('one') with the definite article il- works as an impersonal pronoun. JA verbs agree fully with their subjects, so agreement shows which features the pronoun actually carries. Using constructed and glossed examples and standard syntactic diagnostics, they find that imp-waaħad behaves like the English type rather than the Dutch type. It allows only a generic reading that includes the speaker, and it can occupy many syntactic positions.

On features, the pronoun lacks person, like other impersonals. Unlike them, it is always singular and, in suitable contexts, feminine. The authors also argue that it is a definite but non-specific DP. The result matters because it splits the "featureless" view into two claims: missing person is the core property of impersonals, while number and gender can still be present.

Key points

  • Impersonals in Germanic and Romance fall into two classes.
    • Generic-only pronouns, such as English one and Frisian men, can bear any case.
    • Generic-or-existential pronouns, such as Dutch men and Swedish man, are restricted to nominative.
  • JA imp-waaħad requires the article il-. It gets only a generic inclusive reading, appears in multiple positions, and fits Fenger's (2018) proposal that exclusively generic pronouns project a KP. The syntax follows Ackema & Neeleman (2018).
  • Agreement evidence shows the pronoun is underspecified for person, always singular, and feminine in some contexts (the form waħdih, 'one.fem').
  • Three diagnostics support definiteness:
    • The pronoun shows no quantificational-variability effects, patterning with il-Taalib ('the student').
    • It is banned from existential fii clauses, which require indefinite subjects.
    • It can appear as a conjunct alongside a full DP.
  • Following Hoekstra (2010), the authors conclude that impersonals are definite and differ from personal pronouns by always being non-specific.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat feature deficiency as separate per feature rather than all-or-nothing: a pronoun can lack person yet still carry number and gender.
  • I2. Use visible agreement on the verb as independent evidence for a hidden nominal feature, instead of relying on intuition about meaning.
  • I3. A generic impersonal acts as a bound variable, so every occurrence of it in one sentence refers to the same generic individual.
  • I4. Test definiteness with a battery of diagnostics: exclusion from existential constructions, coordination with full DPs, and the presence or absence of quantificational-variability readings.
  • I5. The link between reading and distribution (generic-only pronouns appear anywhere, and their existential use is impossible) gives a clean negative control.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): let the morphology layer give generic one Number=Sing with no Person value, so agreement checks stay consistent without inventing a person feature.
  • I2 (tree): when gparse or the perceptron parser disagree on a subject attachment, verb–subject agreement features can act as a tie-breaking witness that the parser can explain.
  • I3 (frames): coreference should link all instances of generic one within a sentence to a single GEN variable rather than to any discourse entity, turning "when one…, one…" into a conditional frame.
  • I4 (world): similar checks (e.g., "there is the X" being odd) could decide whether a noun phrase introduces a new world entity, refers back to a known one, or is a non-specific generic that adds no entity at all.
  • I5 (learn): add sentences like "One has called for you" as negative controls, so a reader that resolves generic one to a specific caller is flagged as wrong.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Jordan University of Science and TechnologyIrbid · Jordan10 works · 1,791 citations🎓Petra UniversityAmman · Jordan2 works · 4 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 260 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Mohammad Ali Alhailawani, Waleed Ahmad Othman and Osama Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Ghafer. 2022. On the feature (in)deficiency of dedicated impersonal pronouns: the view from Jordanian Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.9367

@article{alhailawani2022feature,
  title = {{On the feature (in)deficiency of dedicated impersonal pronouns: the view from Jordanian Arabic}},
  author = {Mohammad Ali Alhailawani, Waleed Ahmad Othman and Osama Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Ghafer},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.9367},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9367}
}

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