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

Abstract

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. Analyzing a parallel corpus has the advantage of allowing one to both study the distribution of man en men in original texts and to contrast the use of these pronouns with their translations.