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

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