Full Description
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.
Contents
1. Chapter 1. Personal pronouns: An exposition (by Gardelle, Laure); 2. PART I. Personal pronouns beyond syntax: Competing forms in context; 3. 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 dialect (by Higgs, Lyndon); 4. Chapter 3. Free self-forms in discourse-pragmatic functions: The role of viewpoint and contrast in picture NPs (by Hernandez, Nuria); 5. Chapter 4. Sex-indefinite references to human beings in American English: Effective uses and pragmatic interferences. A case study of your child (by Gardelle, Laure); 6. PART II. First and second person pronouns across genres: Advertising, TV series and literature; 7. Chapter 5. 'Loquor, ergo sum': 'I' and animateness re-considered (by Wales, Katie); 8. Chapter 6. 'You' and 'I' in charity fundraising appeals (by Macrae, Andrea); 9. Chapter 7. Breaking the fourth wall: The pragmatic functions of the second person pronoun in House of Cards (by Sorlin, Sandrine); 10. Chapter 8. How do person deictics construct roles for the reader?: The unusual case of an "unratified reader" in Schnitzler's Leutnant Gustl and Fraulein Else (by Prak-Derrington, Emmanuelle); 11. PART III. Referring to the self and the addressee in context of interaction; 12. Chapter 9. First and second person pronouns in two mother-child dyads (by Caet, Stephanie); 13. chapter 10. Pronouns and sociospatial ordering in conversation and fiction (by Djenar, Dwi Noverini); 14. Chapter 11. Referring to oneself in the third person: A novel construction in text-based computer-mediated communication (by Virtanen, Tuija); 15. PART IV. The pragmatics of impersonal and antecedentless pronouns; 16. Chapter 12. Interpreting antecedentless pronouns in narrative texts: Knowledge types, world building and inference-making (by Emmott, Catherine); 17. Chapter 13. The infinite present: The pronoun on and the present tense in L'exces - l'usine by Leslie Kaplan (by Gjesdal, Anje Muller); 18. Chapter 14. Pragmatic and stylistic uses of personal pronoun one (by Mignot, Elise); 19. Chapter 15. Impersonal uses of the second person singular and generalized empathy: An exploratory corpus study of English, German and Russian (by Deringer, Lisa); 20. Index
