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

Abstract

Research on dedicated impersonal pronouns in Germanic and Romance has shown a correlation between a pronoun’s reading and its case. In particular, impersonal pronouns that are exclusively generic (e.g. English one) can bear any case, whereas those that can be either generic or existential (e.g. Dutch men) can only bear nominative case. Moreover, there is a general consensus in the literature that both types of impersonal pronouns radically lack phi-feature specification, viz. the pronouns are underspecified for person, number, and gender features in the syntax. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to discuss the impersonal use of the pronoun waaħad (one) in Jordanian Arabic (JA) and its implications for the crosslinguistic typology of impersonal pronouns, and second to argue that a radical feature deficiency approach to these pronouns is inaccurate. Regarding the first point, we show that waaħad behaves similarly to English-type pronouns in terms of its interpretation and syntactic distribution. JA waaħad can only have a generic inclusive reading and can appear in multiple syntactic positions. As for the second point, we show that waaħad is not completely phi-defective. The JA pronoun patterns with crosslinguistically recognized impersonal pronouns by being underspecified for person. However, independent empirical evidence from agreement shows that waaħad is always specified for singular number and also for gender in some contexts. This novel data from JA suggest a rethinking of the radical feature deficiency approach to impersonal pronouns. Additionally, we provide evidence for the presence of a DP projection above impersonal waaħad that is overtly instantiated via the definite article il- (the). Our findings show that impersonal pronouns are not radically devoid of phi-features. Whereas impersonal pronouns share the core property of being underspecified for person, some pronouns are specified for number and also for gender in the syntax.