Indeterminate pronoun

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An indeterminate pronoun is a pronoun which can show a variety of readings depending on the type of sentence it occurs in. The term "indeterminate pronoun" originates in Kuroda's (1965) thesis and is typically used in reference to wh-indeterminates, which are pronouns which function as an interrogative pronoun in questions, yet come to have additional meanings with other grammatical operators.{{Cite thesis| first=S.Y.| last=Kuroda | title=Generative Grammatical Studies in the Japanese Language|publisher=MIT|year=1965}}{{refn|The original sense of "indeterminate pronoun" in Kuroda (1965) is distinguishable from how to term is used in the literature following. Kuroda (p. 42-3) held any noun phrase which behaves like a logical variable to be an indeterminate.}}{{cite book|first1=Angelika |last1=Kratzer|first2=Junko|last2=Shimoyama|year=2002|chapter=Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese| title=The Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics|pages=1–25|location=Tokyo|publisher=Hituzi Press|editor-first=Yukio|editor-last=Otsu}}{{cite book|first1=Vaneeta|last1=Dayal|title=Questions|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2016|location=Oxford|page=239}} For example, in Japanese, dare means 'who' in a constituent question like (1) formed with the question-forming operator no:

{{Interlinear|number=(1) | dare-ga hashitta no? | who-NOM run.PST Q | 'Who ran?' }}

However, in a statement (2), in combination with the particle ka, dare 'who' acquires an existential 'someone' meaning:

{{Interlinear|number=(2) | dare-ka-ga hashitta | who-PTCL-NOM run.PST | 'Someone ran' }}

With yet another particle -mo, dare 'who' expresses a universal meaning as in (3):{{cite news| first1=Moreno|last1=Mitrović|first2=Uli|last2=Sauerland|title=Two conjunctions are better than one|journal=Acta Linguistica Hungarica|volume=63|number=4|year=2016|pages=471–494}}

{{Interlinear|number=(3) | dare-mo wakaru | who-PTCL understand.PRES | 'Everyone understands' }}

Languages with wh-indeterminates are typologically very common,{{cite book| first=Martin|last=Haspelmath|year=2013|chapter=Indefinite Pronouns|title=The World Atlas of Language Structures Online|editor-first1=Matthew S.|editor-last1=Dryer|editor-first2=Martin|editor-last2=Haspelmath|publisher=Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology|location=Leipzig}} and this is a characteristic of many language families such as Uralic, Turkic, Dravidian, and the Slavic sub-branch of Indo-European.{{cite journal|first=Anna|last=Szabolcsi|title=What do quantifier particles do?|journal=Linguistics and Philosophy|pages=159–204|year=2015|volume=38|issue=2 |doi= 10.1007/s10988-015-9166-z|s2cid=254750503 |citeseerx=10.1.1.469.1211}} The syntactic and semantic properties of indeterminate pronouns and their interactions with different grammatical operators is a major topic within the study of the syntax-semantics interface.{{cite thesis|first=Junko|last=Shimoyama|title=WH-Constructions in Japanese|publisher=University of Massachusetts, Amherst}}{{cite journal|first=Junko |last=Shimoyama|title=Indeterminate Phrase Quantification in Japanese|journal=Natural Language Semantics|volume=14|pages=139–173|year=2006|issue=2 |doi= 10.1007/s11050-006-0001-5|s2cid=121615386 }}