Mismatching the first person in Romance

This paper looks at mismatching phenomena in Romance languages that appear between verbs and pronouns (or similarly used nouns) when expressing the first person (plural and singular). It is well known that, relative to other pronouns, first person pronouns are more easily subject to meaning shift as well as to replacement by other expressions. This can be attributed to the pivotal function of first person pronouns in referring to the speaker (and included participants). The egocentric use is the basic and underlying function of first person pronouns, but it can also be extended to other functions. Thus, first person pronouns often indicate a speaker’s perspective or some other reference anchored to the speaker. On the other hand, indefinite, third person pronouns like English one, German man or French on can also be used to express first person. Pragmatic principles drive meaning shifts of first person pronouns as well as the use of indefinite pronouns for first persons. Both shifts show particular semantic and syntactic properties, which are sometimes in conflict with one another and thus lead to different kinds of mismatches. In this paper, we examine some data of two types of mismatches and compare them. These arise as: (i) the mismatch between the morphological features of a third person singular indefinite pronoun used to express first person and the features of other constituents that (should) agree with the pronoun, and as (ii) the mismatch between the morphological features of a first person pronoun and its semantic function, more precisely when the value of the respective number feature of the pronoun is singular, while its interpretation is plural. The salient questions we address are: (i) what are the differences between these two types of mismatches, (ii) how can we account for them, and (iii) can we develop a unified account for both types? The paper is structured as follows: first, we briefly describe in section 2 the two types of mismatch at issue, and then we provide in section 3 a brief summary of the different conditions on the use of different morphological exponents used to express first person, including pragmatic motivation, semantic restrictions and syntactic features. We also discuss the agreement hierarchy as a generalization of the interaction of syntactic features of the pronoun and features of its intended referent. Section 4 presents more data on semantic mismatch and discusses Kayne’s (2009) postulation of a “silent ‘nous’” in French. Section 5 gives a brief overview of instances of morphological mismatches in French pronouns, i.e. where French je is used functionally and syntactically as first person plural. We also provide interesting data in which je functions as singular, but shows plural agreement features. In section 6, we summarize the findings, compare the different types of mismatches, and suggest further research directions with respect to a unified analysis.