Defining the Impersonal Pronoun Category in Igbo: Syntactic and Functional Dimensions

Abstract

Some recent studies have highlighted the difference between the Igboimpersonal pronoun and the other pronouns found in the language on the basisof distributional evidence. This has led to proposals either for the rejection ofthe category of impersonal pronoun in Igbo (Nwaozuzu, 2007), or a re-analysisof the Igbo impersonal pronoun as a clitic (Anyanwu, 2005; 2012). This paperprovides further evidence of the distributional differences between theimpersonal pronouns and the other pronouns, but relates the restriction of theimpersonal pronoun to the subject position to its use as an agent defocusingstrategy, in a construction that is functionally equivalent to the Englishagentless passive. Furthermore, the features that differentiate the impersonalpronoun from the other pronouns in Igbo are shown to characterize elementsused for similar functions in other languages. It is argued that, from afunctional perspective, the Igbo impersonal pronoun exhibits the typicalsyntactic and semantic features of impersonal pronouns observed crosslinguistically,which a purely syntactic approach fails to capture.