It's the economy, stupid! Een vergelijkende blik op 'men' en 'man'

Van Haeringen (1956) observes that Dutch is in between English and German, in particular with respect to its inflectional morphology. Interestingly, the inflectional systems of all these languages were richer and more similar in earlier stages. In other words, the speed of deflection is different among the West Germanic languages, English being relatively progressive, German relatively conservative and Dutch indeed taking an in-between position. In this paper it is argued that the process of deflection is reducible to factors that undermine the relation of language-learning children with frequent and consistent positive evidence (namely language contact, child L2 and adult L2 acquisition). It is argued that the scale of language contact that affected the languages involved patterns with the scale of deflection. English is affected relatively strongly whereas (standard) German developed relatively isolated. It is suggested that this is ultimately reducible to purely geographical factors. In this perspective it is no coincidence that Dutch is also geographically in between English and German. This state of affairs offers an interesting research strategy. If a pattern for some particular fact, which at first sight is not at all related to inflection, shows up where Dutch is in between English and German, there is good reason to see if this fact could not be related to deflection (ultimately reducible to language contact). This strategy is applied to the phenomenon of arbitrary reference. It is shown that the Dutch arbitrary pronoun men is on the decline, whereas its German counterpart man is still very productive and the English cognate man/men disappeared in the fifteenth century. It turns out that an account of these facts in terms of deflection is indeed successful, in accordance with the strategy suggested.

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