Indefinite pronouns: A review of Haspelmath (1997)

Certain properties of indefinite pronouns have received considerable attention in the literature. For instance, negative polarity indefinites such as English any constitute the focus of the bulk of the literature on negative polarity items, the fact notwithstanding that Klima in his seminal 1964 paper did not fail to show that members of other syntactic and semantic categories may be restricted to negative contexts in comparable ways (van der Wouden 1997). This new book, however, a thoroughly revised edition of the author’s F.U. Berlin dissertation (Haspelmath 1993), is the first one to aim at a comprehensive overview of the properties of indefinite pronouns across languages – and it does a very fine job indeed.1 The volume contains XVI plus 264 pages, including two appendices, almost twenty pages of references, as well as indexes of languages, authors and subjects. The approach chosen is primarily typological, which is evident from the chapters’ titles: 1. Overview 2. A Typological Perspective on Indefinite Pronouns 3. Formal and Functional Types of Indefinite Pronouns 4. An Implicational Map for Indefinite Pronoun Functions 5. Theoretical Approaches to the Functions of Indefinite Pronouns 6. The Grammaticalization of Indefinite Pronouns 7. Further Sources of Indefinite Pronouns 8. Negative Indefinite Pronouns 9. Conclusions. Extensive data concerning a 40 language sample, biased towards European languages due to limitations on the availability of data, are given VNC-project ‘Partikelgebruik in Nederland en Vlaanderen’, financed by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and FWO. Dept. of General Linguistics, PO Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, the Netherlands; [email protected]. I benefited from comments from Johan Van der Auwera, Martin Haspelmath and Jack Hoeksema on an earlier version; the remaining errors are mine. 1Next to indefinite pronouns, as discussed in Haspelmath’s book, other types of indefinite expressions, such as indefinite noun phrases, have been the focus of study as well. Diesing (1992) is one of a number of studies dealing with the interpretation of indefinites in relation to their structural position.