Temporal and atemporal uses of ‘you’: indexical and generic second person pronouns in English, German, and Dutch

Abstract Second person singular pronouns are widely used in generic contexts, referring to people in general rather than to the single addressee of the utterance. Based on the assumption that pronouns are morphosyntactically complex elements, this paper argues that only pro-$$phi $$Ps in the sense of Déchaine and Wiltschko (2002) are licit in those environments while fully fledged pro-DPs are necessarily interpreted indexically. It is argued that the latter contain an interpretable but unvalued time-feature in D which restricts the interpretation of the entire structure to a specific temporal... Mehr ...