Human impersonal pronouns in Swedish and Dutch: A contrastive study of man and men

Coussé, Evie; van der Auwera, Johan

doi:10.1075/lic.12.2.01cou

Article published In: Languages in Contrast
Vol. 12:2 (2012) ► pp.121–138

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Human impersonal pronouns in Swedish and Dutch

A contrastive study of man and men

Evie Coussé | University of Gothenburg (Sweden)

Johan van der Auwera | University of Antwerp (Belgium)

Published online: 29 October 2012

https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.12.2.01cou

This paper presents a contrastive study of the human impersonal pronouns man in Swedish and men in Dutch. Both impersonal pronouns are etymologically derived from man ‘human being’ and they more or less have the same meaning. However, there are important differences in the usage of these pronouns. In this study, the similarities and differences between Swedish man and Dutch men are studied in a Dutch-Swedish parallel corpus. Analysing a parallel corpus has the advantage of allowing one to both study the distribution of man and men in original texts and to contrast the use of these pronouns with their translations.

Keywords: human impersonal pronouns, parallel corpus, Dutch/Swedish, contrastive analysis

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