Abstract
The paper compares two lexical items, Icelandic maður and Swedish man , for the construction of a detached, general discourse stance (Berman, Ragnarsdóttir and Strömqvist, 2002). Both forms mean ‘man’, but they can also be used in a generic sense. In that usage, Icelandic maður is associated with several semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic constraints, whereas Swedish man is more freely applicable across contexts and genres. Data derived from 632 discourse tokens produced by 158 subjects were analyzed, focusing on frequency distributions of generic usages of maður/man with respect to age (10–11, 13–14, 16–17 years, adults), genre (narrative, expository), modality (speaking, writing), and language (Icelandic, Swedish). Both Icelandic and Swedish revealed a clear preference for using maður/man in expository discourse, a finding which validates the assumption that these terms play a role in the construction of a depersonalized, general discourse stance. Further, Swedish man was used considerably more frequently than Icelandic maður , a finding which is explained as due to the difference in the constraints restricting the domain of use of the apparently equivalent term in the two languages. By and large, two main factors were found to underlie the distributions of maður/man : general socio-cognitive development and culturally specific stylistic constraints.
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