Changing referential practice: The German pronoun 'man' from a diachronic perspective

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The human impersonal pronoun 'man' has peculiar grammatical and interactional features. Within the usage based approach of the Research Unit (RU) 'Practices of referring to persons: personal, indefinite and demonstrative pronouns in use', the project discloses the emergence and routinization of these features in the diachrony of German. The first objective is to empirically verify, elaborate and substantiate a grammaticalization path from generic NP to pronoun starting from proposals in cross-linguistic studies. Based on the reference corpora of OHG and MHG, the project identifies constructional types and relevant contexts (nominal, pronominal and ambiguous bridging contexts), their communicative functions and their degree of routinisation. It asks how grammatical features such as suppletion with ‚ein‘ emerge and how 'jemand'/'niemand' specialize as indefinite pronouns. Special focus lies on the hypothesis that early constructions with 'man' anticipate later interactional functions. Based on its prototypical generic use, 'man' has the potential of agent-defocusing and of referring to any grammatical person: third parties, addressees, and speakers themselves. By choosing 'man' over personal pronouns, speakers position themselves and other referents with respect to responsibility management, normative expectations, supraindividual experience, and social membership. The second objective of this project is to investigate in which way and when nonprototypical referential and interactional functions of 'man' have emerged and routinized and, together with the other historical projects within the RU, how the functional spectre of 'man' interacts with those of other pronouns. For historical stages of German, a full picture can only be gained by comparing the behavior of 'man' across different genres as consolidations of diverse requirements in historical communicative practice. As available corpora are not balanced for comparing genres, the project compiles structured in-depth-samples of 16.-18.ct. texts. These samples consist of three instructional/informative genres: pest treatises, balneologic treatises, and early newspapers, a well as three dialogue-oriented genres: comedies, model dialogues for language teaching, and interrogation records. Medicinal texts, newspapers, and comedies build a link to other projects within the RU. The project analyses the available corpora and in-depth-samples asking when and in which contexts interactional functions of 'man' such as speaker reference emerge and routinize, which functions occur across genres or genre-specifically, and how 'man' interacts with personal pronouns and impersonal constructions. The project combines corpus-driven and annotation-based qualitative and quantifying methods with methods from interactional linguistics. In doing so, the project tests the applicability of the RU's interactional linguistic concepts and methods on diversified historical linguistic data.