On the referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences

Abstract

Canonical linguistic theory postulates a one-on-one referential link between linguistic elements and agents, experiencers, cognizers or patients of certain actions, beliefs, states etc. in the world. Likewise, personal pronouns and person marking through verb morphology have often been described as having a one-on-one referential link with an (interaction) participant. As with all deictic expressions, interpretation of personal pronouns is crucially dependent on the context (e.g. I referring to the speaker, you to the hearer). However, Bühler's well-known concept of Deixis am Phantasma (1934) already shows that reference can be established to items beyond the immediate discourse situation, with interlocutors jointly constructing reference even to hypothetical, future-oriented or counterfactual discourse scenarios. Reference, especially pronominal reference, is not always established easily, as the vast literature on referentiality in several linguistic and philosophical disciplines attests (to name but a few recent contributions: Abbott 2010 for an overview of mostly semantic conceptualizations of reference, Kibrik 2011 for a recent study on reference in discourse, and of course Siewierska 2004 for an in-depth discussion of person reference). Most contributions either focus on third person references (singular or plural, henceforth, 3sg and 3pl; e.g. Borthen 2010, Cabredo Hofherr 2003, and most articles in Enfield/Stivers 2007), or they discuss the inclusion and/or exclusion of the speaker in a group referred to using 1st person plural forms (henceforth, 1pl). Helmbrecht (2015) does offer a more general typology of non-prototypical readings of various persons. In languages without a morphological inclusive/exclusive distinction, the pragmatics of inclusive or exclusive readings have been analyzed as well (e.g. Temmerman 2008; Scheibman 2002 & 2004). On the other hand, reference to singular speaker and hearer (1sg and 2sg) is typically portrayed as unproblematic from a referential point of view, though attention has been drawn to the existence of different participant statuses (Goffman 1979; Ducrot's 1984 polyphony analysis; Halliday 1994). In order to complete our view of the use of speaker and hearer reference, this volume focuses on some uses of the 1 st and 2 nd person (singular as well as plural) where the canonical adscription of pronominal reference is 'violated' by the speaker for pragmatic reasons. This results in referential ambiguity of personal pronouns, which is understood in this volume as uses where the person being referred to cannot be pinned down unequivocally. Such uses can be exploited by interlocutors to their conversational advantage, but an important drawback of referentially ambiguous forms is, of course, the danger of being misunderstood. We want to discuss which linguistic strategies are employed by interlocutors to ensure conversational success and to avoid misunderstandings caused by referential ambiguity.

From zero to ‘you’ and back: A mixed methods study comparing the use of two open personal constructions in Finnish

“…Fremer 2000 on Finland's Swedish, Kamio 2001 on English, Jensen & Gregersen 2016 on Danish), while some have chosen to use the term ‘impersonal reference’ in their description of the phenomenon (e.g. Kitagawa & Lehrer 1990 on English, Siewierska 2008, 2 Malamud 2012 on German; for a discussion, see also Gast et al 2015:149; De Cock & Kluge 2016:352).…”

“…Ragmarsdóttir & Strömqvist 2005, Laitinen 2006) and on the generic use of such personal forms which, from a canonical point of view, are thought to convey deictically specific reference (e.g. Bredel 2002, Helasvuo 2008, Stirling & Manderson 2011, de Hoop & Tarenskeen 2015, Kluge 2016, Zobel 2016; for an overview, see De Cock & Kluge 2016). These studies have shown that in many languages, different ways of creating generic or generalized reference co-exist, and pointed out typical patterns of usage for such personal forms.…”

<i>Sinä</i>, konteksti ja monitulkintaisuus

“…esim. Bredel 2002;Holmberg 2010;Kluge 2016;Zobel 2016;kokoavasti De Cock & Kluge 2016). Kansainvälisesti katsoen erityisen paljon huomiota on saanut juuri yksikön 2. persoona.…”