The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems
A comparative approach
Editor
| University of Toronto
Personal pronouns have a special status in languages. As indexical tools they are the means by which languages and persons intimately interface with each other within a particular social structure. Pronouns involve more than mere grammatical functions in live communication acts. They variously signal the gender of speakers as parts of utterances or in their anaphoric roles. They also prominently indicate with a range of degrees the kind of social relationships that hold between speakers from intimacy to indifference, from dominance to submission, and from solidarity to hostility. Languages greatly vary in the number of pronouns and other address terms they offer to their users with a distinct range of social values. Children learn their relative position in their family and in their society through the “correct” use of pronouns. When languages come into contact because of population migrations or through the process of translation, pronouns are the most sensitive zone of tension both psychologically and politically. This volume endeavours to probe the comparative pragmatics of pronominal systems as social processes in a representative set from different language families and cultural areas.
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 304] 2019. vi, 320 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
1–15
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17–34
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35–56
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57–74
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75–98
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99–131
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133–150
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151–209
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205–217
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219–234
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235–252
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253–287
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289–317
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Index
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319–309
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“The volume opens doors for further pursuit of pronominal intricacies in the world’s languages, and is likely to interest scholars not only in pragmatics, but also in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, politeness research, and interaction.”
Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University, on Linguist List 31.1697 (20 May 2020)
Subjects
BIC Subject: CFG – Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
BISAC Subject: LAN009030 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Pragmatics