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

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-φPs 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 stage of the individual denoted by the pronoun. The article shows that in German, English, and Dutch this time-feature is valued by utterance time, thus leading to an indexical interpretation of the pronoun. From a broader perspective, the time-feature is proposed to be universally present in indexical pronouns. Ultimately, its properties are responsible for crosslinguistic variation in the syntax and semantics of first and second person pronouns.