On the Old English Indefinite Pronoun Man

On the Old English Indefinite Pronoun Man

  This study aims to provide semantic and syntactic explanations for the passive voice of the Old English man construction. Semantically speaking, its passive interpretation comes from the inherently unspecified and nonreferent properties of the indefinite pronoun man; these properties are associated with low inherent topicality and make the man construction susceptible to agent defocusing and the downgrading of transitivity. Low inherent topicality of the indefinite man produces some idiosyncratic syntactic patterns of the man construction such as its absence in a sentence- initial position and the precedence of a personal pronoun or a definite NP over it. Regarding the aforementioned semantic and syntactic properties, I suggest the minimalist-based approach, under which the man construction lacks the agentive light verb v and selects the indefinite man as the specifier of VP. The indefinite man carries the uninterpretable Case features subject to movement forced by T but cannot be attracted by the functional head Top due to its low inherent topicality. Instead, an oblique Case- marked personal pronoun or a definite noun phrase can undergo topicalization and precede the indefinite man, since the former has higher inherent topicality than the latter. The emergence of the expletive man predicts the eventual disappearance of the indefinite man. Around the end of Middle English, the indefinite pronoun man became no longer productive with the passive voice of English regularly expressed by the periphrasis using the auxiliary be.