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Non-standard Uses of German 1st Person Singular Pronouns

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6284))

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on a phenomenon concerning the German first person singular pronoun ich which challenges the standard view on the semantics of first person singular pronouns, i.e. that they are always speaker-referential. The presented data shows a non-standard use of first person singular ich which I analyze to have a similar semantics to the German impersonal (generic) pronoun man. The analysis for non-standard ich is shown to be modifiable to also model the deictic use of ich. Finally, I bring up some related problems that merit further investigation.

I thank Dirk Buschbom, Eva Csipak, Ilaria Frana, Magdalena Schwager and Arnim von Stechow for their comments on various versions of this paper. Thanks also go to Thomas Graf for discussions on the data. All mistakes are of course my own.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georg-August Universität Göttingen, 37073, Göttingen, Germany

    Sarah Zobel

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  1. Sarah Zobel
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. SRA Inc., Key Technology Laboratory, 2-32-8 Minami-Ikebukuro, Toyoshima-Ku, 171-8513, Tokyo, Japan

    Kumiyo Nakakoji

  2. National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 3-5 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, 619-0289, Kyoto, Japan

    Yohei Murakami

  3. Department of English, Aoyama Gakuin University, 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, 150-8366, Tokyo, Japan

    Elin McCready

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Zobel, S. (2010). Non-standard Uses of German 1st Person Singular Pronouns. In: Nakakoji, K., Murakami, Y., McCready, E. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6284. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14888-0_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14888-0_23

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