Article published in:
The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns
Edited by Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin
[Studies in Language Companion Series 171] 2015
► pp. 275–310

Chapter 14. Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun one

| Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris 4)
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
Published online: 10 November 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.14mig
Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

No author info given
2021.  In The Politics of Person Reference [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 320], Crossref logo
Mignot, Elise & Caroline Marty
2018. Denominations of humans. International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2 ► pp. 163 ff. Crossref logo
Montoro, Rocío
2016. The year’s work in stylistics 2015. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 25:4 ► pp. 376 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 december 2021. 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.

References

References

Benveniste, Emile
1966[1956] La nature des pronoms. In Problèmes de linguistique générale 1, 251-257. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Bhat, Darbhe Narayana Shankara
2004 Pronouns. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Chuquet, Jean
1986 TO et l’infinitif anglais, détermination et opérations énonciatives. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Cotte, Pierre
1996 L’explication grammaticale de textes anglais. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Duffley, Patrick
1992 The English Infinitive. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron
1993 Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69 : 274-307. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood & Hasan, Ruqaiya
1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Ritter, Elizabeth
2002 Structuring the bundle: A universal morphosyntactic feature geometry. In Simon & Wiese (eds), Pronouns, Grammar and Representation, 23-39. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
1997 Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Josse, Hélène
2003 Sémantique et syntaxe de ONE en anglais contemporain. PhD dissertation, University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Lyons, Christopher
1999 Definiteness. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lyons, John
1968 Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1977 Semantics, Vols 1 & 2. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary
1933[1970] London: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Martin, James Robert
1992 English Text. System and Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Palmer, Franck
1979 Modality and the English Modals. London: Longman.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik
, Jan 1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rey, Alain & Rey-Debove, Josette
(eds) 1984 Le Petit Robert 1, Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert.Google Scholar
Rissanen, Matti
1967 The Uses of ONE in Old and Early Middle English. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Horst & Wiese, Heike
(eds) 2002 Pronouns, Grammar and Representation. [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 52]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
①
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.Google Scholar
Wales, Katie
1980 ‘Personal’ and ‘indefinite’ reference: The uses of the pronoun One in present-day English. Nottingham Linguistic Circular 9: 93-117.Google Scholar
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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1996 Personal pronouns in Present day English. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar

Corpus

Lomas, Herbert
1986 Letters in the Dark. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Orwell, George
2009[1936] Shooting an Elephant [Penguin Classics]. London : Penguin Books.Google Scholar
The British National Corpus
, version 3 (BNC XML Edition) 2007 Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://​www​.natcorp​.ox​.ac​.uk/Google Scholar
Salinger, Jerome David
1951 [1946] The Catcher in the Rye. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments: Appointed to be Read in Churches: Authorized King James Version
1938 [1611] London: OUP.Google Scholar
Wharton, Edith
1995 [1905] The House of Mirth. Boston MA: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar
2006 [1895] The Importance of Being Earnest. NewYork NY : Norton.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia
1995 [1929] A Room of One’s Own. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar