The Stylistics of ‘You'

This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting across a wide range of genres (ads, political slogans, tweets, news presentation, literary genres etc.), and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition, it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. When 'you' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address, the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways, which is explored in examples taken from Fielding, Brontë, Orwell, Kincaid, Grimsley, Royle, Adichie, Bartlett, Auster, and even Spacey's 'creepy' 2018 YouTube video, ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience.

The ‘I’ in the Monad: Leibniz and the Essential Indexical

Some modern and contemporary philosophers argue that the first-person indexical plays an essential role in the explanation of individual actions. As such it cannot be explained away or replaced by a co-referring term without destroying the cognitive force that its use conveys. There are important aspects of Leibniz’s work that anticipate the view of the essential indexical. The activity in the monad, such as the petites perceptions and appetitions, plays the cognitive role of grounding indexical reference and uses of the first-person pronoun to explain an agent’s perspective and behaviour.

The Self

This chapter argues that Nietzsche distinguishes (in particular, in his Zarathustra) between the bodily self that is constituted by the drives and affects and the reflectively conscious self. According to the reading proposed by the author, the latter depends on the former. More precisely, the reflectively conscious self is just the personal-level upshot of the subpersonal order among drives and affects. The chapter also addresses Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the intuitive but mistaken conception of the conscious self as independent from our bodily constitution, and his belief that the sui generis usage of the first-person pronoun is among the sources of this illusion.

Passive voice, first person pronouns and mental process verbs in the physical sciences reseach article

Recent studies have suggested that there has been a decrease in passive use, and an increase in the use of first person pronouns in scientific writing. This study looks at six sample texts from the physical sciences. The correlation between low passive use and use of first person pronoun subjects is only partial. The influx of verbs of a mathematical nature in recent decades has led to an increase in verbs of mental process. These lend themselves more easily to the use of first person pronouns. There are now two models available, a progressive model using fewer passives and a number of first person pronoun subjects, and a traditional model using passive forms extensively and avoiding first person pronoun subjects.

To We or Not to We: Corpus-Based Research on First-Person Pronoun Use in Abstracts and Conclusions

A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses “we” in academic writing to acknowledge one’s stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun “we” is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the literature, this study conducted a systematic corpus analysis of the use of “we” in the abstracts and conclusions of 400 articles collected from eight leading electrical and electronic (EE) engineering journals. The abstracts and conclusions were extracted to form two subcorpora, and an integrated framework was applied to analyze and seek to explain how we-clusters and we-collocations were employed. Results revealed whether authors’ use of first-person pronouns partially depends on a journal policy. The trend of using “we” showed that a yearly increase occurred in the frequency of “we” in EE journal papers, as well as the existence of three “we-use” types in the article conclusions and abstracts: exclusive, inclusive, and ambiguous. Other possible “we-use” alternatives such as “I” and other personal pronouns were used very rarely—if at all—in either section. These findings also suggest that the present tense was used more in article abstracts, but the present perfect tense was the most preferred tense in article conclusions. Both research and pedagogical implications are proffered and critically discussed.

UTTERANCE NOMINALIZATION PECULIARITIES BY MEANS OF PERSON NAMES IN THE ENGLISH AND TATAR LANGUAGES

В данной статье анализируются высказывания из национальных лингвистических корпусов татарского и английского языков с точки зрения возможности их номинализации посредством наименований лица, включенных в состав данных высказываний. Рассмотрены как традиционно выделяемые типы номинализации - события, факта, пропозиции, так и номинализация посредством наименования лица как периферийный тип. Установлено, что как английское, так и татарское номинативное предложение не выполняет по отношению к называемому одушевленному лицу функции субституции и конкретное наименование лица, выражая признак, обладает лишь предикативной референцией. Выявлены сходства и различия в функционировании наименований лица как средства номинализации в английских и татарских высказываниях. Сделаны выводы о том, что в английском языке автономное функционирование наименования лица как отдельного предложения возможно только в разговорной речи. В стилистически нейтральных высказываниях английского языка всегда имеет место глагол. В татарском языке оценка может выражаться как наименованием лица, так и прилагательным. В обоих языках достаточно частотными являются наименования лица, образованные от имен прилагательных путем инверсии. И в английском, и в татарском языках исследуемые примеры довольно часто содержат сопровождающее местоимение второго лица. This article analyzes the statements from the national linguistic corpus of the Tatar and English languages from the point of view of their nominalization potential by means of the person names in these above-mentioned statements. The author considered both the traditionally distinguished types of nominalization (events, facts, propositions) and nominalization by the person name as a peripheral type. It has been established that both the English and Tatar nominative sentences do not fulfill the function of substitution in relation to the named animate person, and the specific person name expressing the feature has only a predicative reference. The similarities and differences in the functioning of the person names as the means of nominalization in English and Tatar expressions have been revealed. The author concluded that in English the autonomous functioning of the person name as a separate sentence is possible only in colloquial speech. In stylistically neutral expressions of the English language, a verb always occurs. In the Tatar language, the assessment can be expressed both by the person name and by the adjective. In both languages, the person names formed from adjectives by means of inversion are quite frequent. In both the English and Tatar languages, the studied examples quite often contain an accompanying second person pronoun

Pragmatic person features in pronominal and clausal speech act phrases

This paper proposes the necessity of pragmatic person features (Ritter and Wiltschko 2018) in pronominal and clausal speech act phrases in Korean, giving three main arguments for such necessity: (i) pragmatic person [addressee] is needed for hearsay mye which expresses the meaning of you told me without the lexical verb of saying, (ii) pragmatic person [speaker] is needed for the unequal distribution of first-person plural pronouns with exhortative ca ‘let us’, and (iii) pragmatic persons [speaker], and [addressee] are needed for the asymmetric distribution of a dative goal argument in secondhand exhortatives. Based on the compatibility and incompatibility of exhortative ca- and secondhand exhortative ca-mye clauses with a first-person pronoun (e.g., na ‘I’, ce ‘I’, wuli ‘we’, and cehuy ‘we’), I argue that pragmatic person features are needed in syntax to account for their distribution.

Some Observations on Demonstrative Pronouns in the Tarnovo Edition of the Stishen Prologue

The article successively examines the demonstrative pronouns for general display, for close people and objects, for distant people and objects and for enumerating, which have the function of the 3rd person forms of personal pronouns in the Tarnovo edition of the Stishen Prologue (a calendar hagiographic collection, translated in the first half of the fourteenth century). It is established that the semantics of the demonstrative forms is determined by the context: in a combination with a noun form they have an indicative meaning, and in a combination with a verb form they mean a third-person pronoun, for example, съи блажен!и which means този блаженият (“this blissful one”), съи бэше means той беше (“he was”). The use of the elongated forms for masculine тъи, for feminine тя, for the plural тие / тйе which later turn into he, she and they, as well as the presence of the new forms тои, characteristic of the spoken language, are historically significant.