Looking for the Impersonal Core -- Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages

Looking for the Impersonal Core -- Impersonal Pronouns across Germanic languages

IPG_CORE examines the grammatical properties of German, Norwegian, and Swedish impersonal pronouns outside of and inside attitude contexts (i.e., sentential arguments of attitude verbs, like "believe"). The aim is to provide new linguistic data and theoretical results that allow us to settle the question whether the behaviour of impersonal pronouns can be traced back to a single impersonal core meaning. I will conduct this investigation using empirical methodology developed in corpus linguistics (i.e., corpus studies) and linguistic typology (i.e., questionnaire studies). In addition, I will incorporate two lines of theoretical research into the current discussion that have so far been pursued independently of the research on impersonal pronouns: the semantic behavior of (pro)nominal expressions in attitude contexts and results on pronominal typology. The ideal environment to tackle both the empirical and theoretical aspects of IPG_CORE is the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo (UiO). Close collaborations with my supervisor Prof. Patel-Grosz and the colleagues at the department, scientific and practical support, high-level training opportunities, one-of-a-kind resources (e.g., the Oslo Multilingual Corpus), and an overall inspiring working atmosphere distinguish the UiO as the ideal place to bring IPG_CORE to a fruitful conclusion.