The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns
Editors
Laure Gardelle | ENS de Lyon, UMR ICAR
Sandrine Sorlin | Aix-Marseille University, LERMA, IUF
This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.
[Studies in Language Companion Series, 171] 2015. vi, 337 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
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Chapter 1. Personal pronouns: An expositionLaure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin | pp. 1–24
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PART I. Personal pronouns beyond syntax: Competing forms in context
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Chapter 2. She said “I don’t like her and her don’t like me”: Complex interpersonal relations expressed through personal pronoun exchange in the Black Country dialectLyndon Higgs | pp. 27–44
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Chapter 3. Free self-forms in discourse-pragmatic functions: The role of viewpoint and contrast in picture NPsNuria Hernández | pp. 45–68
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Chapter 4. Sex-indefinite references to human beings in American English: Effective uses and pragmatic interferences. A case study of your childLaure Gardelle | pp. 69–92
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PART II. First and second person pronouns across genres: Advertising, TV series and literature
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Chapter 5. ‘Loquor, ergo sum’: ‘I’ and animateness re-consideredKatie Wales | pp. 95–104
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Chapter 6. ‘You’ and ‘I’ in charity fundraising appealsAndrea Macrae | pp. 105–124
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Chapter 7. Breaking the fourth wall: The pragmatic functions of the second person pronoun in House of CardsSandrine Sorlin | pp. 125–146
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Chapter 8. How do person deictics construct roles for the reader? The unusual case of an “unratified reader” in Schnitzler’s Leutnant Gustl and Fräulein ElseEmmanuelle Prak-Derrington | pp. 147–170
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PART III. Referring to the self and the addressee in context of interaction
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Chapter 9. First and second person pronouns in two mother-child dyadsStéphanie Caët and Aliyah Morgenstern | pp. 173–194
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chapter 10. Pronouns and sociospatial ordering in conversation and fictionDwi Noverini Djenar | pp. 195–214
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Chapter 11. Referring to oneself in the third person: A novel construction in text-based computer-mediated communicationTuija Virtanen | pp. 215–238
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PART IV. The pragmatics of impersonal and antecedentless pronouns
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Chapter 12. Interpreting antecedentless pronouns in narrative texts: Knowledge types, world building and inference-makingCatherine Emmott | pp. 241–258
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Chapter 13. The infinite present: The pronoun on and the present tense in L’excès – l’usine by Leslie KaplanAnje Müller Gjesdal | pp. 259–274
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Chapter 14. Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun oneElise Mignot | pp. 275–310
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Chapter 15. Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy: An exploratory corpus study of English, German and RussianLisa Deringer, Volker Gast, Florian Haas and Olga Rudolf | pp. 311–334
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Index | pp. 335–337
“This volume is highly commendable, as it gives a thought-provoking panoramic view of personal pronoun analysis in different approaches and languages, aiming at an increased dialog and awareness of results coming from other approaches than one’s own, and also between scholars working on different languages.”
Bettina Kluge, University of Hildesheim, in English Text Construction Vol. 12:1: pp. 154–161.
Cited by
Cited by 8 other publications
Bouissac, Paul
2019.
In The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 304],
► pp. 1 ff. 
Bouissac, Paul
2019.
In The Social Dynamics of Pronominal Systems [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 304],
► pp. 133 ff.
Chaemsaithong, Krisda
2021.
In Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics [Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 28],
► pp. 155 ff.
Günthner, Susanne
2021. WIR im interaktionalen Gebrauch: Zur Verwendung des Pronomens der 1. Person Plural in der institutionellen Kommunikation – am Beispiel onkologischer Aufklärungsgespräche.
Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 49:2 ► pp. 292 ff.
Hernández, Nuria
2021. Personal Pronouns: Variation and Ambiguity.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 69:3 ► pp. 237 ff.
Montoro, Rocío
2016. The year’s work in stylistics 2015.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:4 ► pp. 376 ff.
Serrano, María José
2018. Managing subjectivity: Omission and expression of first-person singular object a mí in Spanish media discourse.
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 63:3 ► pp. 423 ff.
Statham, Simon & Rocío Montoro
2019. The year’s work in stylistics 2018.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 28:4 ► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 08 november 2022. 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.
Subjects & Metadata
BIC Subject: CFG – Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General