Generic uses of the second person singular – how speakers deal with referential ambiguity and misunderstandings

Bettina Kluge
Abstract

The present contribution examines how interlocutors resolve reference problems concerning the second singular person (2sg) in ongoing conversation. Apart from its ‘normal’ reading as a term of address, generic and also speaker-referring uses have been documented and studied for a variety of languages. However, there are amazingly few documented cases of interlocutors who openly display having problems of disambiguation between forms of address and reference to a larger entity ‘anybody in this particular situation’. A sequential analysis shows that interlocutors tend not to ask for further specification of reference in a possibly ambiguous situation, most likely for face reasons: Instead, they tend to rely on contextualization in later conversational development and on all available conversational resources. Ambiguous reference that leads to misunderstandings only becomes a topic once serious conversational problems arise and the need for disambiguation becomes more important than interlocutors’ face needs.

Keywords:
Quick links
A browser-friendly version of this article is not yet available. View PDF
Bolinger, Dwight
(1979) To catch a metaphor. You as norm. American Speech 54.3: 194-209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borthen, Kaja
(2010) On how we interpret plural pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 42.7: 1799-1815. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson
(1978/1987) Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bühler, Karl
[1982] (1934) Sprachtheorie. Stuttgart: Fischer.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Coveney, Aidan
(2003) ‘Anything you can do, tu can do better’. Tu and vous as substitutes for indefinite on in French. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.2: 164-191. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moneglia, Massimo
(2005) The C-ORAL-Rom Resource. In Emanuela Cresti, and Massimo Moneglia (eds.), C-ORAL-Rom. Integrated reference corpora for spoken Romance languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 1-70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser
(2005) Mental spaces in grammar. Conditional constructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Cock, Barbara
(2014) Profiling discourse participants. Forms and functions in Spanish conversation and debates. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Hoop, Helen, and Sammie Tarenskeen
(2015) It’s all about you in Dutch. Journal of pragmatics 88: 163-175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duchan, Judith, Gail Bruder, and Lynne Hewitt
(eds.) (1995) Deixis in narrative. A cognitive science perspective. Hillsdale/NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Ehmer, Oliver
(2011) Imagination und Animation. Die Herstellung mentaler Räume durch animierte Rede. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Fina, Anna
(2003) Identity in narrative. A study of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
DeMello, George
(2000) ‘Tú’ impersonal en el habla culta. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 48.2: 359-372. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, Inke
(2009) ‘Wir bleiben Kanzlerin – We are pregnant’? On grammatical, semantic and pragmatic usages of the ‘we’ pronoun. Saarland working papers in linguistics 3: 21-34.Google Scholar
(2010) Discursive constructions of immigrant identity. A sociolinguistic trend study on long-term American immigrants. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Duszak, Anna
(2002) Us and others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles
(1979) Mental spaces: A discourse processing approach to natural language logic. Manuscript, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar
(1985) Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge/Mass.: The MIT Press. [reprinted 1994 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press].  BoPGoogle Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner
(2002) The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Gregersen, Frans, and Torben Juel Jensen
this volume) What do(es) you mean? The pragmatics of generic second person pronouns in modern spoken Danish. Pragmatics 26.3: 417-446. DOI logo
Hummel, Martin, Bettina Kluge, and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop
(eds.) (2010) Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. México DF: El Colegio de México.Google Scholar
Hyman, Eric
(2004) The indefinite YOU. English Studies 2: 161-176. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jensen, Torben Juel
(2009) Generic variation? Developments in use of generic pronouns in late 20th century spoken Danish. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41: 1-19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kitagawa, Chisato, and Adrienne Lehrer
(1990) Impersonal uses of personal pronouns. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 739-759. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Kluge, Bettina
(2010) El uso de formas de tratamiento en las estrategias de generalización. In Martin Hummel, Bettina Kluge, and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop (eds.), Formas y fórmulas de tratamiento en el mundo hispánico. México DF: El Colegio de México, pp. 1107-1139.Google Scholar
(2012) Referential ambiguity in discourse. The generic use of the second person singular in the Romance languages. Habilitation thesis, Universität Bielefeld.Google Scholar
Laberge, Suzanne, and Gillian Sankoff
(1979) Anything you can do. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Syntax and semantics, vol. 12: Discourse and syntax. New York: Academic Press, pp. 419-440.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George
(1987) Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam, and Richard Watts
(2005) Politeness Theory and Relational Work. Journal of politeness research, 1.1: 9–33. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Malchukov, Andrej, and Anna Siewierska
(2011) Introduction. In Andrej Malchukov, and Anna Siewierska (eds.), Impersonal constructions. A cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 1-15. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rubba, Jo
(1996) Alternate Grounds in the interpretation of deictic expressions. In Gilles Fauconnier, and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, worlds and grammars. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 227-261.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson
(1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50.4: 696-735. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel
(1992) Repair after next turn. The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97.5: 1295-1345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, Anna
(2004) Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, Helen
(2005) (Im) Politeness, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their bases and interrelationships. Journal of politeness research 1.1: 95-119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2007) Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics 39.4: 639-656. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Miranda
(1992) Personal reference and politeness strategies in French and Spanish: A corpus-based approach. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Edinburgh: Heriot-Watt University, Department of Modern Languages.Google Scholar
(1995) Personally speaking … or not? The strategic value of on in face-to-face negotiation. French Language Studies 5: 203-223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sweetser, Eve, and Gilles Fauconnier
(1989) Cognitive links and domains: Basic aspects of mental space theory. In Gilles Fauconnier, and Eve Sweetser (eds.), Spaces, worlds, and grammar. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-28.Google Scholar
Tarenskeen, Sammie
(2010) From you to me (and back). The flexible meaning of the second person pronoun in Dutch. Unpublished Master’s thesis in General Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen. (URL: www​.ru​.nl​/publish​/pages​/518697​/sammie​_scriptie​_definitief​.pdf, 2962011).Google Scholar
Temmerman, Martina
(2008) ‘Today, we’re all Danes.’ Argumentative meaning of the 1st and 2nd person pronouns in newspaper editorials on the Muhammad cartoons. L’analisis linguistica e letteraria 16: 289-303 (= Special issue: Proceedings of the IADA Workshop Word Meaning in Argumentative Dialogue, Homage to Sorin Stati, Milan 15-17 May, 2008).Google Scholar
Wales, Katie
(1996) Personal pronouns in present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar
Wedgwood, Daniel
(2011) The individual in interaction: Why cognitive and discourse-level pragmatics need not conflict. Intercultural Pragmatics 8.4: 517-542. DOI logo  BoPGoogle Scholar
Zobel, Sarah
this volume) A pragmatic analysis of German impersonally used first person singular ‘ich’. Pragmatics 26.3: 379-416. DOI logo