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Silent people
The pseudo-impersonal
Michael Brody
I argue that cases of personal pronouns that appear to be interpretable as
universal impersonals only in the presence of a (typically locative) adverbial
phrase are in fact not impersonal pronouns at all. These “universal impersonal
cum adverbial” constructions involve an ordinary anaphoric personal pronoun
whose antecedent is a silent people hidden in the locative.
1. Introduction
A personal pronoun is standardly taken to have the universal impersonal
(“quasi-universal” in Cinque 1988) reading if it refers to people, roughly to typical
humans, to humans in general.1 Characteristic examples include (1a) and (2a). A
possible interpretation of these is by and large on a par with that of the impersonal nominals in (1b) and (2b):
(1) a. We should save the world
b. People should save the world
(2) a. You don’t do that in polite company
b. One does not do that in polite company
Personal pronouns interpreted as universal impersonals are distinct from definite
pronouns that happen to have an universal impersonal nominal as their antecedent as in (3a) and from the existential impersonal use of personal pronouns, discussed originally in the eighties by Suner (1983) and Jaeggli (1986), where the
pronoun has the sense of ‘somebody /some people’ and not ‘typical people/ people
in general’ e.g (3b):
(3) a. People think they don’t like to work
b. They sell newspapers on Melrose
1. I am grateful to Kata Brody for a number of path-opening conversations on this material and
would like to thank also two anonymous reviewers. See now Brody (2013) for a different approach.
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
Michael Brody
Note also that, indicating three linguists and saying that “they are clever”, one
might refer to (a set including) the three linguists present or to a kind which is
only exemplified by the three linguists present (eg. linguists, syntacticians etc.). So
the deictic use itself may be definite or generic, but both of these deictic uses are
distinct from the true universal impersonal, which requires no deixis. See Brody
(2011) for further discussion.
Consider then, the so-called universal impersonal sense of the third person
plural personal pronoun, on which (4a) is essentially equivalent to (4b).
(4) a. In Italy they like to take a nap in the afternoon.
b. In Italy people like to take a nap in the afternoon
This reading is generally available for nonstressed 3rd plurals pronouns. The
construction appears to have either this general people reading or the definite interpretation for the plural pronoun where it refers to a more restricted group,
picked out by a linguistic or other contextual antecedent. Cf. e.g. Cinque (1988:
545–547), Condoravdi (1989), Ovalle (2002), Hofherr (2003), Tóth (2010).
Although examples discussed in the literature typically involve subjects, the
third plural universal impersonal phenomenon is not restricted to these, so it is
not plausibly attributed to some property of inflection. (5a, b) are parallel to (4a, b)
with a relevant object pronoun.
(5) a. In Italy the police can arrest them without a warrant
b. In Italy the police can arrest people without a warrant
Examples like (5) were noted in Cinque (1988: 549), but have not often been discussed since. Perhaps because these are more restricted than the cases with the
pronoun in subject position. While both (4a) and (5a) are acceptable on the universal impersonal reading, there is a clear contrast between (6a) and (6b) in the
possibility of the universal impersonal interpretation of the pronoun:
(6) a. In Italy they celebrated the soccer victory yesterday
b. #In Italy the police arrested them yesterday
But this contrast appears to be due to an independent reason. Sentences with specific time reference allow the generic “people” in subject but not in object position.
On the natural assumption that the restriction that excludes (7b) has to do with
the interpretation of “people”, it will automatically cover also (6b) with the universal impersonal pronoun interpreted as people.
(7) a. In Italy, people celebrated the soccer victory yesterday
b. *In Italy, the police arrested *(the/some) people yesterday
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Silent people 
2. Some problems of the universal impersonal cum adverbial construction
As noted above, the impersonal cum adverbial construction appears to be ambiguous. Assuming that this is due to the pronoun being optionally interpreted as
people (and therefore not simply as an ordinary definite pronoun with a contextually given antecedent/ referent) creates a number of problems, some of which
would appear to question the viability of the various approaches entailing this
hypothesis.
i. One well known curious property of the construction exemplified by (4a) is
that the locative phrase apparently cannot be omitted when the pronoun is used in
the impersonal/universal/people sense:
(8) a. #They like to take a nap in the afternoon (...who?, – no impersonal/people
reading possible)
b. #The police can arrest them without a warrant (...who?, – no
impersonal/people reading possible)
c. People like to take a nap in the afternoon. – OK
d. The police can arrest people without a warrant – OK
See for example Condoravdi (1989), Tóth (2010) and others. (As argued in Brody
2011, the generalization may actually be incorrect, plural third person pronouns
in fact can be used in the sense of ‘typical human(s)/humans in general’ in certain
contexts even without a restricting adverbial. But since the counterexamples do
not materially change the argument and position presented below, for the sake of
a less cluttered presentation I shall pretend here that they don’t exist.)
This is a quite curious state of affairs. If they is ambiguous between the definite
and the people sense, why is this latter sense not a possible reading for they in
(8a, b), when, as (8c, d) show, the context appears to allow this.
Could it be that something is missing from they that is present in “people”
which is supplied by the locative in (4)? But the meaning of “people” surely does
not contain a locative. So the unacceptability of (8a, b) on the relevant reading
raises the question: what is it that must be present for the pronoun in (8a, b) to be
used in the universal impersonal sense of (8c, d) and is missing in (8a, b), and is
furthermore such that the locative phrase in (4) can supply it.?
This seems to be a difficult puzzle, raising doubts about the standard ambiguity approach. And so far we have considered only the question of what is assumed
to be the missing element in (8a, b), and not the immediately following issue: why
does this element, whatever it is, have to be present.
Notice that it would not be much of an answer by itself, to say that the universal impersonal pronoun needs a restriction on its domain. While apparently true,
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
Michael Brody
this answer would only result in a restatement of the problem, and essentially the
same questions would continue to arise. Why is it just locative phrases that can
supply this restriction? Why does the pronoun on the people -reading but not the
noun “people” itself, which clearly has the people -reading, need the restriction?
ii. As we look closer, problems multiply. The set of possible additions that make
(8a, b) possible on the relevant reading is quite restricted. While these elements are
typically locative phrases, some temporal expressions are also fine. See Tóth (2010),
where the examples (9)–(10) below are borrowed from:
(9) In the middle ages they ate mostly potatoes
So far this is fairly straightforward, we might generalize over times and places,
perhaps, if we like, by taking time-points to be abstract locations in time.
The problem comes from the next observation: unlike the typical acceptability
of (4a) with the locative, only a subset of temporals are acceptable in the
construction:
(10) a. #Last year, they ate mostly potatoes (...who?)
b. #On sunny days, ...
c. #Generally, ...
Notice that the fact that (10a, b, c) are acceptable with the pronoun taken to be
used ostensively to refer to a set of people, some members of which are present, is
not strictly relevant. This use, discussed in Brody (2011), is distinct from the universal impersonal cum adverbial construction as witnessed by the fact that omitting the adverbial does not result in a decrease of acceptability.
In addition the pronoun on the ostensive reading cannot qualify as a universal
impersonal since its interpretation is not people in general, but only some contextually determined subset of the set of (all) people. In the universal impersonal cum
adverbial structure on the other hand the pronoun appears to refer to people in
general, even if the whole sentence makes a statement only about a subset of
people, as delimited by the adverbial.
So our question for the ambiguity theory becomes more complex: how can we
characterize the meaning-element, the addition of which can make (8a, b) grammatical on the relevant reading, such that locatives generally and only certain
temporals, like the one in (9) but not the ones in (10), can provide it?
iii. Further problems arise if we extend our view from third plurals to other personal pronouns. The universal impersonal people interpretation is possible also
with 1st and 2nd plural and 2nd singular pronouns and, rather marginally and in
an even more restricted range of constructions, even by a 1st singular pronoun.
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Silent people 
(The possibility of using the first singular as universal impersonal is noted in
Kitagawa & Lehrer 1990.)
(11) In Italy, we like to take a nap in the afternoon (=”(Us,)people(relevantly
connected with Italy) we like to take a nap in the afternoon”)
(12) In Italy, you(pl) like to take a nap in the afternoon (=”(You,) people
(relevantly connected with Italy) you like to take a nap in the afternoon”)
(13) In Italy you take a nap in the afternoon (=”(When) in Italy, one (should)
take a nap in the afternoon.”)
(14) In Italy, when I go to the cinema, I expect to see a good film, don’t I?
(=”(When) going to to the cinema in Italy, one expects to see a good
film”)
There are various major and important differences in syntactic and interpretive
properties among these cases, that I will simply gloss over here. (These differences
include: (a) The fact that crucially, the adverbial can be omitted in (11, 13 and 14)
but must be present in (12) for these sentences to have the universal impersonal
reading. (b) That the first singular only allows the universal impersonal reading in
a highly restricted set of contexts, cf: “In Italy, I take a nap in the afternoon”, which
cannot mean that people/one (should) take a nap in the afternoon. (c) The referential domain of the third plural under the universal impersonal interpretation
does not include the speaker and the hearer while the second person is included in
(12) and the 1st and potentially the second) is included in (11). (d) That (13), and
(14), with their implication of expected behavior differ semantically from all the
plural cases. As the glosses indicate, these seem to involve a (rule-like) implication,
while the plural examples appear to be more like statements of facts. See Brody
(2011) for an attempt to make sense of these matters.)
Putting these differences aside for now, observe that the singular (13), (14) and
the first and second plurals in (11) and (12), just like the third plural in (4), (5), (9)
are at least in principle capable of exhibiting the universal impersonal people
interpretation.
It is not the case however, that any personal pronoun can be so interpreted: the
third singular personal pronouns he, she appears not to allow this reading.
(15) In Italy, he takes a nap in the afternoon (not= “People/one (should) take a
nap in the afternoon”)
(I assume that languages like Finnish, for example, with a null subject universal
impersonal construction in the third singular do not involve an (empty) personal
pronoun, but rather the empty correspondent of the overt impersonal morpheme,
– one in English. Cf. eg. Holmberg 2005, Holmberg et al. 2009.)
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
Michael Brody
(Actually, there are cases where he can refer to ‘humans in general’ or ‘typical
humans’ (Brody 2011), but the issues involved are immaterial to the discussion
here. In particular the existence of this possibility does not eliminate the contrast
between the 3sg and the 3pl pronouns noted above.)
The contrast between the apparently ambiguous third plural in (4a) and the
lack of ambiguity, that is the lack of (universal-)impersonal interpretation of its
singular counterpart in (15) is surprising. Why can the 3rd sg, apparently alone
among the +human personal pronouns, not be used in the universal impersonal
sense? And more to the point here, how come that the universal impersonal interpretation in the universal impersonal cum adverbial construction is widely available for the 3rd plural personal pronouns, but probably universally unavailable for
the 3rd singular?
3. A shift of perspective
Searching for solutions, let us consider first a different but related construction in
(16):
(16) a. The Italians arrived yesterday
b. The French work 24 hours a day
(17) a. The Italian arrived yesterday
b. The French works 24 hours a day
(16) carries the unmistakeable hallmark of the impersonal interpretation: given a
context that provides no overt or understood antecedent, the interpretation of the
subject must be +human. So (16a), as a first sentence in a book, would be about
Italian people, and not for example Italian packages. As (17) shows, the same construction occurs also in the singular. The phenomenon is general: it shows up with
any adjective that can apply to a +human entity, as exemplified in (18). Without an
overt or covert antecedent available, the subject in (18) refers to a singular or plural +human entity, it has the sense of “the tall one” or “the tall people”, – but not
“the tall thing(s)/object(s)” or “the tall plants” for example.
(18) The tall arrived yesterday
(There appears to be some variation in English regarding the acceptability of (18)
without the head N one. This does not materially affect our argument since the
empty noun construction is clearly available in the examples (16, 17). In many
languages, including French and Hungarian no placeholder is ever necessary in
this type of adjectival construction in general.)
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Silent people 
Putting aside the issue of whether the NP has an empty nominal head or the
adjective becomes the head of the NP, substituting for this silent element, it is clear
that in definite descriptions corresponding to noun phrases with a missing and
antecedentless head noun, the default +human interpretation is available and is in
fact obligatory.
Getting closer to the impersonal constructions with the plural third personal
pronoun consider next (19):
(19) We/you(pl)/they, the Italians, often sleep in the afternoon.
Clearly there is no need to postulate an ambiguity for the plural personal pronouns
to account for the impersonal interpretation in (19): the obvious way to analyze
this reading is to assume, that here the plural personal pronouns have the antecedent of the phonologically null impersonal head of the appositive definite
description.
Now let us turn to (20).
(20) a. We/you(pl)/they, in Italy, often sleep in the afternoon
b. *In Italy like to sleep in the afternoon
c. People in Italy like to sleep in the afternoon
“In Italy” in (20a) is ambiguous: it may simply be a locative, as in “We/you(pl)/they
often sleep in the afternoon when we/you(pl)/they are in Italy”, or parallel to (19)
it may be part of an appositive description with an understood impersonal subject
interpreted as people. In the former case the overt pronouns must receive a personal interpretation. In the latter, exactly the same account will cover also the appositive descriptions in (20) that we were led to assume for (19): The antecedent of
the personal pronouns is the invisible impersonal people provided by the optional
alternative interpretation of the locative expression. After all, the relevant difference between (19) and (20) is essentially only that instead of a non-locative modifier in the former, we find here a locative expression.
Note incidentally, that the impossibility of (20b), where the locative is in subject position, suggests strongly, especially given its contrast with (20c), that the
presence of the people -interpretation in the locative is a semantic matter only. In
other words, that there is no phonologically null impersonal empty head N present
in the locative. This should not matter for the overt pronoun, whose antecedent/
reference quite generally need not be syntactically represented, it only needs to be
present/salient in the (linguistic or non-linguistic) context.
Returning now to our original plural universal impersonal example in (4a), we
see that it is the same construction as (20), apart from the fact that the appositive
description of (20) is in a left dislocated position in (4a). So the shift of perspective
I’d like to suggest is this: Instead of taking the apparent impersonal reading of a the
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
Michael Brody
3rd plural personal pronoun to be due to the ambiguity of pronouns between a
definite and an impersonal interpretation, let us assume that the pronoun in the
universal cum adverbial construction with the apparent universal impersonal interpretation is an ordinary definite referential pronoun with a contextual, overtly
unexpressed, antecedent: people. In other words (4a) is equivalent to (21) with
people in the locative being covert, present only semantically. Universal cum adverbial constructions with apparently impersonal personal pronouns are pseudoimpersonals; – they involve an ordinarily used non-impersonal pronoun with a
covert impersonal antecedent. This is a silent “people”, recalling Kayne’s (2005)
silent “hours” and “years”.
(21) People in Italy, they like to take a nap in the afternoon.
Interestingly, silent people may be part of a silent locative phrase as in (22a), which
we can analyze along the lines of (21) as (22b), with a covert locative licenced by
the salient prior mention of a place:
(22) a. Italy is a relaxed country. They like to take a nap in the afternoon/on
sunny days.
b. Italy is a relaxed country. People there, they like to take a nap in the
afternoon/on sunny days
The possible presence of a silent locative here will account for the apparent problem, noted by an anonymous reviewer, that adverbials like “on sunny days” that
normally do not licence the universal impersonal reading appear to do so in contexts that contain a location.
Analyzing (22a) as (22b), we see that it is not necessary to assume that the
temporal somehow becomes a licensor of the universal impersonal here.
(The solution generalizes to the second plural with adverbial construction like
the one in (23a). The generic universal impersonal readings of the 1st and 2nd
singular must be of a different origin since (a) as a pseudo-impersonal they would
have no well-formed source (eg. 23b) and (b) an adverbial is not necessary with
these (e.g. 23c).
(23) a. (you people) At this firm you seem to like to shave yourself before
going to work
b. (*you(sg) people/one/man) At this firm, you shave yourself before going to work
c. It’s normal that you shave yourself before going to work
An adverbial is not necessary with the 1st plural universal impersonal either, so
this also needs an alternative approach. As the present note is about the pseudoimpersonal, I will not address these questions here, but see Brody 2011.)
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Silent people 
4. Some problems solved
i. An immediate consequence of the present proposal is that he contrast between
(8a, b) and (8c, d) ceases to be puzzling. Universal impersonal they is not taken any
more to be a synonym of “people” so there is no reason to expect these sentences
to behave similarly.
ii. Since people-insertion appears to be possible only in contexts that contain an
explicit or implicit adverbial, we can naturally assume that this interpretation is a
property of N-modifiers. It follows, that the default people-sense of our examples
cannot refer to the totality of human beings. The syntactically non-realized people
can only be used to refer to some appropriately restricted set of humans, where
the restriction is contextually available, typically as the predicate of a description.
We might assume that it is this requirement that makes “people-deletion/interpretation” recoverable. We will have then accounted also for the ungrammaticality of (8a, b): they have no appropriate source. In (24) the structure contains
no N-modifier, silent people is not contextually restricted hence it cannot
be present.
(24) a. *People, they like to take a nap in the afternoon
b. *People, the police can arrest them
The problem of finding a meaning-element that is missing from the third person
pronoun on the universal impersonal reading but is present in the noun people
disappears, the third person pronoun does not even have a universal impersonal
reading, it is an ordinary definite pronoun with a universal impersonal antecedent,
– an antecedent that needs to be restricted when phonologically (and syntactically)
null. So it follows that the third plural pronoun on the people-reading but not the
(overt) noun “people” in the corresponding structural position needs an appropriate contextual restriction.
This approach improves on the condition it replaces, according to which a
particular interpretation of an element (the putatively antecedentless and ambiguous pronoun) was possible in the presence of a restriction (the locative/temporal
phrase), while independent evidence ((8a, b) vs (8c, d) above) showed that the
interpretation in question did not in fact need the restriction.
iii. Looking at the contrast between 3rd singular and plural pronouns in the universal cum adverbial construction, we have an immediate explanation for the observed difference: unlike in the plural case, in the singular there is no well-formed
source:
(25) (*He, people/one/man) In Italy, he takes a nap in the afternoon
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
Michael Brody
(The present account explains why the 3rd plural (and plurals in general) but not
the 3rd singular can participate in the pseudo-impersonal construction. It does
not of course explain why the 2nd singular and under some circumstances the 1st
singular, but not the 3rd singular can apparently have a universal impersonal interpretation . On these matters see again Brody 2011.)
5. Stage vs individual level modifiers
Recall that the restriction does not have to be locative, – the temporal restriction
(perhaps an abstract temporal location) in (9) is equally acceptable. However the
temporals in (10) do not provide a restriction that licenses an empty people. The
distinction between temporals like the one (9) and those in (10) is not a special
property of the universal impersonal construction only. It shows up also in the
corresponding possessives:
(26) a. People in the middle ages (ie. “people of the middle ages”, “people who
lived in the middle ages”)
b. #People last year (not construable as “people of last year” “people who
lived last year”)
c. #People on sunny days (not construable as “people of sunny days”
“people who lived on sunny days”)
As the contrast between (26a) and (26b, c) shows, the distinction between stage vs
individual level properties appears to be pertinent. To form the relevant natural
class for the construction expressing “belonging”, the possessor (the target of belonging) must express a property that is construable as an individal level property
of the possessed (the element that belongs).
In contrast to locatives and I-level temporals, stage–level temporal adjuncts
are not possible N-modifiers in general:
(27) a. It was [a/the man on the street] that I have in mind
b. It was [a/the man in the 19th century] that I have in mind
c. *It was [a/the man on rainy days] that I have in mind
This is not surprising in view of the fact that objects can be individuated on the
basis of where they happen to be, but time-slices of objects are not part of our
natural naive ontology. Given the independent difference in N-modifying ability
between stage-level and I-level temporal adjuncts, our approach predicts also the
contrast between (9) and (10). In the fomer the temporal expression can be a modifier of silent people, but in (10) the non I-level temporal expressions cannot be
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Silent people 
N-modifiers, so no silent people can be present, –hence no universal impersonal
reading is possible.
To summarize, our main conclusion is that the third plural in constructions like
(4a) does not represent a genuine impersonal use of the personal pronoun. This is
instead a case of an ordinary personal pronoun with a covert impersonal antecedent: – the pseudo-impersonal. (The next question is whether personal pronouns
without a(n overt or covert) linguistic antecedent can ever be used in the universal
impersonal sense. As I argue in Brody (2011), the answer is positive, though in
some of the cases the examples that genuinely show the phenomenon may not
have been identified previously.)
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