인칭대명사와 담화역할

Personal Pronouns and Their Speech Roles

The referents of the 1st and 2nd person pronouns are not fixed, but shift according to the situation, as participants take turns to speak. This paper was written to describe a wide variety of social and political roles and stances of these inter-personal pronouns. The actual discourse referents for we are seemingly limitless; its precise interpretation is dependent on the particular context of use. ‘Inclusive we’ ostensibly implies joint activity; but in different contexts there is actually a greater pull either towards egocentricity [+ego] or a vocative function [+voc]. The most striking example of egocentric reference is the so-called ‘royal we’ and ‘editorial we’, both representing the authority of the speaker. The ‘inclusive we’ with its addressee role is used when the speakers feel solidarity with the subordinate addressees. Impersonal pronoun one, recently, is used as a socio- linguistically marked form of I among the upper class and royalty and their hangers-on. To refer to the addressee, the third person forms can be used, implying deference, distance, or intimacy. On the evidence of medieval and Early Modern English texts the polite form you was used to address a singular social superior and also a social equal among the upper class, leaving thou for address to a social inferior and for reciprocal address among the lower classes. There was, however, considerable fluctuation between you and thou in address to the same individual, even within the same utterance. This code-switching of you and thou frequently signals expressive shifts of feeling that are not easily explained by a power semantic.