Nominal speech act structure: Evidence from the structural deficiency of impersonal pronouns

In this paper, we propose that there is a speech-Act structure in the nominal spine, just as there is in the clausal spine. Its function is to encode what we do when we utter a nominal: That is, we name, describe, or track individuals. Thus, speech-Act structure establishes a link between the discourse referent and the speech-Act situation. The evidence we discuss comes from nominals that lack this speech-Act structure, namely impersonal pronouns. We argue that impersonal pronouns have in common that they lack nominal speech-Act structure but are not otherwise a natural class: They vary in syntactic structure. Thus, we propose a novel formal typology of impersonal pronouns.