Cover not available
Part of
The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems: A comparative approach
Edited by Paul Bouissac
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 304] 2019
► pp. 35–56

Chapter 2
When we means you

The social meaning of English pseudo-inclusive personal pronouns

| Macquarie University

This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative analysis of interactions collected in a New Zealand rugby team to analyse the way in which pronominal choice impacts upon the social dynamics of leadership discourse. In particular, the pseudo-inclusive first person plural pronoun is examined in terms of its solidarity enhancing effect and mitigation of leadership-focused speech acts. Pronominal use is analysed with reference to the sociolinguistic concept of stance alignment and how this can mitigate potential face-threat. The discussion considers that by including themselves with the addressees of an interaction, leaders can attenuate the illocutionary force of speech acts such as directives and criticism, whilst maximising the directness of their expression, and goes on to question the social function of pseudo-inclusive compliments.

Keywords: clusivity, leadership, speech acts, stance, illocutionary force
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature
    • 2.1Stance
    • 2.2Clusivity, stance and the pronominal system
    • 2.3Control acts, compliments and criticism
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Qualitative analysis
  • 5.Quantitative analysis
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 23 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.304.02wil
References
Adachi, Chie
2016 ‘Sugoi!–Indexicality and Stancetaking in Japanese Compliments’. Language in Society 45 (02): 193–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bass, Bernard M.
1990 Bass and Stodgill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications. 3rd ed. New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Singapore: The Free Press.Google Scholar
Berry, Roger
2009 ‘You Could Say That: The Generic Second-Person Pronoun in Modern English’. English Today 25 (03): 29–34. DOI logo. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope., and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics; 4. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman
1960 ‘The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity’. In Style in Language, ed. by T. A. Sebeok, 253–76. Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press. [URL]Google Scholar
Choi, Seongsook, and Stephanie Schnurr
2014 ‘Exploring Distributed Leadership: Solving Disagreements and Negotiating Consensus in a “Leaderless” Team’. Discourse Studies 16 (1): 3–24. DOI logo
Crevani, Lucia, Monica Lindgren, and Johann Packendorff
2010 ‘Leadership, Not Leaders: On the Study of Leadership as Practices and Interactions’. Scandinavian Journal of Management 26 (1): 77–86. DOI logo
Cysouw, Michael
2003 The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2005 ‘Syncretisms Involving Clusivity’. Typological Studies i n Language 63: 73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cock, Barbara
2011 ‘Why We Can Be You: The Use of 1st Person Plural Forms with Hearer Reference in English and Spanish’. Journal of Pragmatics 43 (11): 2762–75. DOI logo
2016 ‘Register, Genre and Referential Ambiguity of Personal Pronouns’. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 26 (3): 361– 378.Google Scholar
DuBois, John
2007 ‘The Stance Triangle’. In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, ed. by Robert Englebretson, 139–82. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, Susan, Jiansheng Guo, and Martin Lampert
1990 ‘Politeness and Persuasion in Children’s Control Acts’. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (2): 307–31. DOI logo
Filimonova, Elena
2005 Clusivity: Typology and Case Studies of Inclusive-Exclusive Distinction. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fraser, Bruce
1980 ‘Conversational Mitigation’. Journal of Pragmatics 4 (4): 341–50. DOI logo
Goffman, Erving
1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.Google Scholar
1974 Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
1981 Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Golato, Andrea
2003 ‘Studying Compliment Responses: A Comparison of DCTs and Recordings of Naturally Occurring Talk’. Applied Linguistics 24 (1): 90–121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goodwin, Charles
2007 ‘Participation, Stance and Affect in the Organization of Activities’. Discourse & Society 18 (1): 53–73. DOI logo
Gumperz, John Joseph
1999 ‘On Interactional Sociolinguistic Method’. In Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discours e in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, ed. by Srikant Sarangi and Celia Roberts, 454–71. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haverkate, Henk
1992 ‘Deictic Categories as Mitigating Devices’. Pragmatics 2 (4): 505–522. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herbert, Robert K., and H. Stephen Straight
1989 ‘Compliment-Rejection versus Compliment-Avoidance: Listener-Based versus Speaker-Based Pragmatic Strategies’. Language & Communication 9 (1): 35–47. DOI logo
Holmes, Janet
1984 ‘Modifying Illocutionary Force’. Journal of Pragmatics 8 (3): 345–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1986 ‘Compliments and Compliment Responses in New Zealand English’. Anthropological Linguistics 28 (4): 485–508.Google Scholar
1988 ‘Paying Compliments: A Sex-Preferential Positive Politeness Strategy’. Journal of Pragmatics 12 (3): 445–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2005 ‘Leadership Talk: How Do Leaders “Do Mentoring”, and Is Gender Relevant?’ Journal of Pragmatics 37 (11): 1779–1800. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 ‘Men, Masculinities and Leadership: Different Discourse Styles at Work’. In Gender and Spoken Interaction, ed. by Pia Pichler and Eva Eppler, 186–210. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, and Meredith Marra
2004 ‘Leadership and Managing Conflict in Meetings’. Pragmatics 14 (4): 439–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Íñigo-Mora, Isabel
2004 ‘On the Use of the Personal Pronoun We in Communities’. Journal of Language and Politics 3 (1): 27–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kiesling, Scott Fabius
forthcoming. Stance and Stancetaking: Theory and Practice in Sociolinguistics. [URL]
2004 ‘Dude’. American Speech 79 (3): 281–305. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 ‘Style as Stance’. In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by Alexandra M Jaffe, 171. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 ‘Stance in Context: Affect, Alignment and Investment in the Analysis of Stancetaking’. In IMean 2011. UWE Bristol. [URL]
Kitagawa, Chisato, and Adrienne Lehrer
1990 ‘Impersonal Uses of Personal Pronouns’. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (5): 739–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor
1993 ‘Constructing Social Identity: A Language Socialization Perspective’. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26 (3): 287–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oh, Sun-Young
2010 ‘Invoking Categories through Co-Present Person Reference: The Case of Korean Conversation’. Journal of Pragmatics 42 (5): 1219–42. DOI logo
Quirk, Randolph, S Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and J Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Raelin, Joe
2011 ‘From Leadership-as-Practice to Leaderful Practice’. Leadership 7 (2): 195–211. DOI logo
Richards, Keith
2010 ‘Professional Orientation in Back Region Humor’. Text & Talk– An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse & Communication Studies 30 (2): 145– 167. DOI logo
Vine, Bernadette
2004 Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse of Power in Workplace Interaction. Pragmatics & Beyond, new ser. v. 124. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009 ‘Directives at Work: Exploring the Contextual Complexity of Workplace Directives’. Journal of Pragmatics 41 (7): 1395–1405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wales, Katie
1996 Personal Pronouns in Present -Day English. Cambridge [England]  ;New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wieczorek, Anna Ewa
2009 ‘This Is to Say You’re Either in or out: Some Remarks on Clusivity’. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 3 (2): 118–29.Google Scholar
2010 ‘“And I Quote”: Direct and Indirect Point-of-View Switches in Clusivity-Oriented Discourse’. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 6 (2): 229–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Nick
2010 ‘Bros, Boys and Guys: Address Term Function and Communities of Practice in a New Zealand Rugby Team’. New Zealand English Journal 24: 33–54.Google Scholar
2013 ‘Interaction without Walls: Analysing Leadership Discourse through Dramaturgy and Participation’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17 (2): 180–199. DOI logo
2017 ‘Developing Distributed Leadership: Leadership Emergence in a Sporting Context’. In Challenging Leadership Stereotypes through Discourse: Power, Management and Gender., ed. by Cornelia Ilie and Stephanie Schnurr, 147–70. Singapore: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2018 ‘Linguistic Ethnography’. In The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, ed. by Bernadette Vine, 40–50. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa, and Joan Manes
1980 ‘The Compliment as a Social Strategy’. Paper in Linguistics 13 (3): 391–410. DOI logo
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Piippo, Irina
2021. Mirror-like address practice in Arabic-medium classroom interaction. In Intersubjectivity in Action [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 326], ► pp. 109 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.