Publications
Publication details [#31878]
Kitagawa, Chisato and Adrienne Lehrer. 1990. Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (5) : 739–759.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0378-2166
Journal WWW
Annotation
This article examines the use of the personal pronouns you, we, and I as impersonal pronouns in discourse situations that involve structural knowledge and general truths. The stylistic and rhetorical differences among the impersonal you, we, and I follow from their deictic use. The extension of the 2nd person pronoun to an impersonal pronoun is restricted to languages with small, closed pronoun sets.