Abstract The lexical item man is characterized by a combination of specific morphosyntactic and semantic properties and a broad range of usages. It is argued that this is due to a process of grammaticalization that in the earliest stages of German started with its separation from the noun meaning ‚man‘/‘human being‘ and is not completed in present-day German. Focussing on today’s most frequent usage of man – its personal usage – it is argued that man has taken on the function of a role variable, thus having entered the paradigm of dialogue roles in opposition to the functions of the first and second person. The semantic features inherent in the lexeme man in this paradigm are identified as +human and unspecified role in the communicative event. The latter feature provides the distinctive value against first person speaker role, sesond person hearer role as well as against the central value of all third person nominals, which is defined as -dialogue role.
Gabriele Diewald (Tue,) studied this question.