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The referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences
Edited by Barbara De Cock and Bettina Kluge
[Pragmatics 26:3] 2016
► pp. 473–500

“Que bé, tu! (« that’s great, you! »)”

An emerging emphatic use of the second person singular pronoun tu (you) in spoken catalan

The Catalan second person singular (2sg) pronoun tu (you) has acquired a wide range of pragmatic values in spoken registers that have received little or no attention from scholars in the field. The aim of the present article is to analyse a particular emerging use of the 2sg pronoun tu from a corpus-based perspective. In the light of Grammaticalisation Theory, it is argued that whereas in some contexts this pronoun maintains all or part of its referential function (e.g. as subject or as a vocative, respectively), in other contexts its use is very similar to that of an emphatic pragmatic marker. Data drawn from three spoken corpora suggest that the pronoun has consolidated this new use. Prosodic evidence is also provided to show the semantic and pragmatic changes undergone by the pronoun.
Keywords: Person deixis, Spoken corpora, Pragmatic markers, Grammaticalisation
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.26.3.06bla
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

De Cock, Barbara
2022. Register, genre and referential ambiguity of personal pronouns. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 361 ff. DOI logo
Zobel, Sarah
2022. A pragmatic analysis of german impersonally used first person singular ‘ICH’. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 379 ff. DOI logo
Droste, Pepe & Susanne Günthner
2021. Enacting ‘Being with You’. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 31:1 ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo

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