Pronouns of Address and Social Negotiation in as You Like it

Abstract

None of the extant approaches to Early Modern English you and thou can satisfactorily account for all types of pronominal shift present in Shakespeare's plays. The difficulty often lies in swift changes of pronoun performed by one speaker while addressing the same hearer, sometimes in the course of the same dramatic scene or even within the same conversational turn. In this article, some landmarks in the study of the pronouns of address — Brown and Gilman (1960), McIntosh (1963), Wales (1983) — are briefly discussed before concentrating on some of the problems posed by Celia's and Rosalind's shifts of pronominal choice in As you like it. McIntosh's analysis of you and thou in this play is questioned, and the shortcomings of approaches in terms of the norm/deviation or marked/unmarked dichotomies lead to the conclusion that the pronouns of address in Early Modern English must have fulfilled other functions beside those of conveying ‘expressive’ or ‘attitudinal’ overtones. Finally, it is suggested that you and thou might have functioned as markers of in-group or out-group relations in the negotiation of social identities, and as discourse markers signalling a change of conversational topic and the presence of a boundary in the structure of the dialogue.

Social stratification and stylistic choices in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday

“…While Lincoln starts his address of Lacy with the you form (in the singular), a shift to thou forms takes place when Lincoln gets angry about the offer that the Lord Mayor made his nephew. This shift from you to thou forms, which reflects how pronoun choices were used as linguistic 'barometers' , appears to be an exception in Lincoln and Lacy's dialogues (see Calvo 1992, Busse 2002, Blake 2002and Freedman 2007 for the distribution and function of thou and you in Shakespeare's plays). In all other conversations both characters only use the polite and formal you forms of address.…”

A survey of grammatical variability in Early Modern English drama

“…Terms of address, similarly defined, have been studied by U. Busse (1998), Blake (2002b), Calvo (1992) and Jucker (2012). Other grammatical features which have attracted attention include part-of-speech category conversion (Wales, 1987); complement clauses (Fanego, 1990a(Fanego, , 1990b; auxiliary and copula verbs (Biese, 1987;Kakietek, 1987); third person present tense verb forms (Taylor, 1987) and the colloquial use of your as a generic deictic determiner (Wales, 1985).…”

Historical Discourse Analysis

“…For example, it has been suggested that the demonstrative pronoun this in ME (as in "this Pandarus") functions as a foregrounder (Fludernik 1995;Sell 1985). Work on EModE has attributed a discourse function to the variant personal pronominal forms you/thou (see references in Stein 1985b: 348): Calvo (1992) 144 Laurel J. Brinton argues that in addition to negotiating social identities and expressing attitudinal features, these forms may denote a change in conversational topic and mark discourse boundaries; similarly, Hope (1994) sees these forms as having not only a "macropragmatic" function in encoding the differential status of the interlocutors, but a "micro-pragmatic" function in expressing emotional attitude. Wales (1995) also sees a discourse role for the generalizing your (i.e.…”