Generic "man" constructions in Slavonic?

Andrea Sansò asanso at gmail.com
Tue Oct 11 18:28:07 UTC 2005


Dear list members,

I'm conducting a study on impersonal "man" constructions, i.e. constructions
in which nouns originally meaning "man" or "people" have become generic
human subjects, such as "on" in French and "man" and related items in many
Germanic languages. My question is very specific. I came across a quotation
of a paper by Andre' Mazon in Melanges Mikola (Helsinki 1931), which
unfortunately I didn't find in any library within reach. The title of the
paper, however, leaves no doubts about its content: it is "L'emploi indefini
du nom de l'homme en slave". Now, since to the best of my knowledge I didn't
find any "presence" of man-constructions in any grammar of any Slavonic
language, I was wondering whether such constructions really exist in some
Slavonic language. It could be the case that they have escaped the attention
of linguists because they are typical of the spoken register, or whatever.
Perhaps they have simply escaped my attention! I will appeciate any useful
suggestions both by experts of Slavonic languages and by native speakers.
Please reply
to me directly. Of course, I will post a summary if significant results
emerge.

Thanks in advance,

Andrea Sanso'
Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata
Universita' di Pavia, Italy
>
>



More information about the Funknet mailing list