third person generic pronouns
3rd person generic pronouns | Simon Cole | February 11th, 2002
Hello Sue,
I'm having a little trouble deciding when a plural 3rd person pronoun is generic. What do you think about them in the following excerpts from my corpus?
"In addition, more than 1,600 people have applied since September to the Government's Powershift scheme for grants to convert their cars to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG)."
"Israel will also restrict the internal movement of senior Palestinian Authority officials, who must now have their cars inspected at the Israeli checkpoints that remain in force around every Palestinian town, Ra'anan Gissin, Mr Sharon's spokesman, said."
I think the first one is not generic because it is a specific group of people tied to a past event. The second one is generic because, although the group is limited, it is present tense and therefore could apply to anyone who enters or leaves membership of that group. At first I thought the past tense was a key to defining generic-ness, but now I think it is this possibility of entering or leaving the group. That means reported speech and uses of the past tense to create distance can be generic, as in the following:
'Another Vatican official said despite their concerns, officials in Rome were highly reluctant to appear more concerned about priests' rights than victims' needs.'
"The now indigenous tourists, noses against the fencing, took their looks, drew their conclusions."
However, it seems that a 3rd person pronoun referring to members of a finite group, specific in time and space and tied to a past event, can be generic if they are spoken about hypothetically. In these cases cotext, such as conditionals and modals help identify them. I'm aware, also, that generic-ness is merely inferred sometimes.
That, at least is how I would like to define 'generic-ness' for the sake of tallying them in my corpus. What do you think?
Regards,
Simon
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