The third person plural impersonal in Swedish. A typological account

Abstract

The present paper analyses the Swedish 3pl personal pronoun de/dom ‘they’ as an important linguistic means of expressing impersonality, which according to Anna Siewierska (2008a) involves presenting the agent as non-referential and not-specified (or defocused) in discourse. In its non-referential function, the pronoun is seen as constituting the core of the so-called 3pl impersonal construction widely discussed in the typological research context. A close-reading investigation of language data taken from the Internet enables us to give a more adequate description of the construction and its subtypes in Swedish. The analysis is based on the taxonomy established for 3pl impersonals in European languages, and also highlights what has been neglected in the typological descriptions regarding the 3pl pronoun’s impersonal occurrence in this language. The paper provides evidence for a set of the Swedish 3pl impersonal uses, which are characterized as universal, corporate, vague and specific existential readings, as well as for the item’s quotative function in the speech act verb construction de säger ‘they say’. However, the so-called inferred existential reading of de/dom ‘they’ has not been confirmed.