Chapter 14. Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun one
In this paper we investigate the uses of personal pronoun one. Our study is based on 604 occurrences of personal pronoun one; 263 of those were extracted from the British National Corpus and the rest from other sources. First of all we discuss the inclusion of one in the category of personal pronouns, and describe its characteristics, i.e. its various meanings and the theoretical issues raised by its description. We then try to identify the factors that trigger the occurrence of one rather than another pronoun. We observe that one appears in hypothetical contexts, that it regularly co-occurs with modal auxiliaries and ‘thinking’ verbs, and that generally speaking it involves a typical scenario (a ‘script’) where change is involved (most often, but not exclusively, a change in someone’s belief, or opinion). We propose that this is linked to the origin of the personal pronoun, which is related to the numeral one. We hypothesize that at some abstract level the notion of ‘unity’ is retained; the more a person undergoes change, the more we need to denote, somehow, his or her unity (the person is the same, despite the changes).1
References
Benveniste, Emile
1966[1956] La nature des pronoms. In Problèmes de linguistique générale 1, 251-257. Paris: Gallimard.
Bhat, Darbhe Narayana Shankara
2004 Pronouns. Oxford: OUP.
Chuquet, Jean
1986 TO et l’infinitif anglais, détermination et opérations énonciatives. Paris: Ophrys.
Cotte, Pierre
1996 L’explication grammaticale de textes anglais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Duffley, Patrick
1992 The English Infinitive. London: Longman.
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron
1993 Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse.
Language 69 : 274-307.
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood & Hasan, Ruqaiya
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Harley, Heidi & Ritter, Elizabeth
Haspelmath, Martin
1997 Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Josse, Hélène
2003 Sémantique et syntaxe de ONE en anglais contemporain. PhD dissertation, University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Lyons, Christopher
1999 Definiteness. Cambridge: CUP.
Lyons, John
1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics, Vols 1 & 2. Cambridge: CUP.
Oxford English Dictionary
1933[1970] London: Clarendon Press.
Palmer, Franck
1979 Modality and the English Modals. London: Longman.
Payne, John & Huddleston, Rodney
2002 Nouns and noun phrases. In
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
Rodney Huddleston &
Geoffrey Pullum (eds), 323-523. Cambridge: CUP.
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik
,
Jan 1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Rey, Alain & Rey-Debove, Josette
(eds) 1984 Le Petit Robert 1, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert.
Rissanen, Matti
1967 The Uses of ONE in Old and Early Middle English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Rissanen, Matti
1997 The pronominalization of ONE. In
Grammaticalization at Work: Studies of Long-Term Developments in English,
Matti Rissanen,
Merja Kytö &
Kirsi Heikkonen (eds), 87-143. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Simon, Horst & Wiese, Heike
Stirling, Lesley & Huddleston, Rodney
2002 Deixis and Anaphora. In
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,
Rodney Huddleston &
Geoffrey Pullum (eds), 1449-1564. Cambridge: CUP.
Wales, Katie
1980 ‘Personal’ and ‘indefinite’ reference: The uses of the pronoun One in present-day English.
Nottingham Linguistic Circular 9: 93-117.
Wales, Katie
1994 Royalese: The rise and fall of ‘The Queen’s English’. A report on the distinctive ‘dialect’ of the British Royal Family.
English Today 39, Vol.10, n°3 (July 1994): 3-10.
Wales, Katie
1996 Personal pronouns in Present day English. Cambridge: CUP.
Corpus
Lomas, Herbert
1986 Letters in the Dark. Oxford: OUP.
Orwell, George
2009[1936] Shooting an Elephant [Penguin Classics]. London : Penguin Books.
The British National Corpus
, version 3 (BNC XML Edition)
2007 Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
[URL]
Salinger, Jerome David
1951 [1946] The Catcher in the Rye. London: Penguin Books.
The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments: Appointed to be Read in Churches: Authorized King James Version
1938 [1611] London: OUP.
Wharton, Edith
1995 [1905] The House of Mirth. Boston MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press.
Wilde, Oscar
2006 [1895] The Importance of Being Earnest. NewYork NY : Norton.
Woolf, Virginia
1995 [1929] A Room of One’s Own. Cambridge: CUP.
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Mignot, Elise & Caroline Marty
Montoro, Rocío
2016.
The year’s work in stylistics 2015.
Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:4
► pp. 376 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 june 2024. 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.