Person Singular Pronoun Research Articles

LANGUAGE MEANS OF INTERTEXT EXPRESSION IN THE HISTORICAL NOVEL “MALLOWS” BY ROMAN IVANYCHUK

The purpose of the article is to study the linguistic means of expressing the intertext in the Ukrainian historical prose of Roman Ivanychuk “Mallows”. To achieve the goal, the following tasks have been solved: 1) the differences in the implementation of intertextuality in the historical novel and artistic discourse are clarified; 2) the specifics of the linguistic means of expressing intertext at linguo-structural levels are revealed; 3) the intertext is analyzed according to the following criteria: method of contextual explanation (implicit or explicit quotation); reproduction in the text (verbatim or transformed); location (epitextual or intratextual); the functional load of the intertext, the method of passporting and its original source. The orientation of the work requires the use of the following methods: descriptive and the method of observation, with the help of which the specifics and means of realizing the intertext in the historical novel are analyzed; analysis and synthesis – for systematization and generalization of research materials; the method of transformational analysis – to identify formal and semantic changes in the recipient text; the method of linguo-stylistic analysis – for the study of linguistic means of expression in the structure of an artistic text from a functional-aesthetic point of view; the method of stylistic analysis – to determine the stylistics of the intertext and the analysis of various stylistic passages found in the historical novel; the method of contextual-interpretative analysis – to clarify the functional load of the means of implementing intertextuality, in particular for the analysis of content categories of the text; elements of componential analysis – to establish the semantic features of relevant components of historical prose; the method of quantitative calculations – to identify the frequency of use of intertextual elements in the work. The research results demonstrate that the following intertext elements are distinguished in the historical novel: quotations, allusions, cento texts, stylization and intertextual nomination. Linguistic means of expressing intertext are defined as: lexical – words and phrases that help introduce intertext into the author’s work; syntactic – constructions of direct and indirect speech, exclamatory, definite-personal and two-member sentences; grammatical – forms of the 1st person singular pronoun and verb forms of the 1st and 2nd person singular and plural; graphic – design in quotation marks and non-text marker – paragraph indentation. Quotations, in terms of explication in the text, are the most common elements. The functions of quotations and allusions are defined: characterological, dialogic, content-creative, structural- compositional. The types of transformation of quotations are revealed: fragmentation and replacement of one or more lexical components, contamination of different quotations, use of individual components, compositional transformations. Allusions are characterized, which contain only a hint by which we recognize them in the novel and refer the reader to literary works, folklore, and historical events. The specifics of the cento text, saturated with various associations and references to pretexts, which often combine allusions and quotations, are detailed. Stylization as a manifestation of intertext at the level of reproducing the stylistics of another text is substantiated. The author’s deliberate combination of the texts of the following styles: official, epistolary, confessional and administrative-office sub-styles, which were used with a certain stylistic purpose, was traced. The intertextual nomination is considered, which involves the use of iconic proper names of historical persons, names of events and significant historical places. We consider religious names to be precedential because they are associated with a certain literary work or a well-known precedential text.

“Não esqueça eu” - O uso do pronome sujeito EU em função de objeto no português popular do Brasil

Portuguese, like many other Romance languages, is traditionally classified as a pro-drop language with a nominative-accusative alignment in its pronominal system. This means that it basically encodes the subject function on the verb, whereas the object function is marked on the object pronoun itself. However, spoken Portuguese in Brazil has been known to have drastically readjusted its pronominal system due to the introduction of novel pronouns such as você and a gente that do not inflect for case and which both trigger the verb to be inflected for 3rd person singular. Obviously, such radical changes can affect the entire pronominal system. New evidence taken from various sources such as pop music and X (Twitter) show precisely this: loss of case distinction seems to affect also other pronouns in Spoken Brazilian Portuguese. This paper tries to follow this development with the example of the 1st person singular pronoun eu by analyzing data found on social media and comparing it to written sources as far back as the 15th century.

Reconstructing stop and nasal-initial 1st person pronouns to Proto-Trans-Himalayan

Abstract Two 1st person singular pronouns, #ŋa and #ka, are reconstructed for Proto-Trans-Himalayan. The functions of these roots and the relation between them in the proto-language have not been definitively established. Other work has presented a distinct case for a 1st person plural #ka in PTH. This paper compares the evidence for 1st person singular and plural #ka and argues that they are the same root, which in some languages has shifted from plural to singular function.

“I have known….” A Corpus-driven Study of Personal Pronouns in Letters of Recommendation in an L2 Context

In recent times, there has been an upsurge of scholarly attention on hitherto occluded genres such as the Letter of Recommendation (LoR). Although several studies have been conducted on the LoR, studies on lexico-grammatical features are rare. This study, therefore, adopts a corpus-driven approach to examine the use of personal pronouns (PPs) in LoRs written by Ghanaian academics. A specialized corpus of LoR, totalling approximately twenty thousand (20, 000) running words was created for this study. The concordance tool in AntConc (v. 3.2.4.) was employed to search for all instances of PPs in the corpus. The concordance lines were manually examined to determine the referents of the PPs. The study revealed the diversity of PP resources in LoRs. It was also found that the PPs were mainly recommender-oriented, recommendee-oriented, or requester-oriented, culminating in a proposed model of discourse-internal and external participants in LoRs. Again, the study revealed that LoR is typified by singular PPs, reflecting the fact that it is mainly authored by an individual for an individual. The findings have implications for the pragmatics of PPs and the scholarship on LoR. It is thus recommended that an intercultural study of LoR be undertaken to establish variations in the use of personal pronouns. Keywords: Corpus Linguistics, L2 Context, Letter of recommendation, English for Specific Purposes

Gender, number and person: a three-way interaction

Abstract According to the principle of informativity, more useful information is more likely to be coded than less useful information. This principle underlies Greenberg’s Universals 37 and 45, which state that a larger number of (sex-based) gender contrasts are on average found in singular than in non-singular forms. As an increase in group size lowers the probability of same sex groups, gender-specific personal pronouns are less useful in the non-singular than in the singular. Curiously enough, the principle of informativity also makes the opposite prediction: in the first person, non-singular forms are predicted to show a gender contrast more frequently than singular forms do. Moreover, exclusive forms are predicted to develop gender distinctions more often than inclusive forms. In this paper, these predictions are put to a typological test. A total of 51 languages from 17 different families and 24 different genera has been found in which the first person singular personal pronoun is gender-neutral while one or more of its non-singular counterparts inflect for gender. It is argued that Universals 37 and 45, as well as their counterclaim, are empirically adequate. This apparent paradox dissolves in a three-way interaction of gender, number and person in pronominal paradigms. In keeping with the principle of informativity, there is a bias in favour of gender marking in the third person singular but also a bias in favour of gender marking in the first person non-singular.

Non-gendered pronoun processing: an investigation of the gender non-specific third person singular pronoun ‘TA’ in Chinese

ABSTRACT This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, “TA,” in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender pronouns in reference to antecedents with varying stereotypical gender (e.g., occupation terms) and definitional gender (e.g., kinship terms). In our analysis, we assessed several means of operationalizing stereotypical gender information. Optimal model performance was achieved with a continuous measure that accounted for individual differences in gender perception, suggesting the involvement of a probabilistic component. Results for reading latencies and perceived appropriateness of TA support previous findings from discourse analysis that TA is not entirely gender-neutral but rather has nuanced contexts of use in modern Chinese written discourse.

Detecting COVID-19 Fake News on Twitter: Followers, Emotions, Relationships, and Uncertainty

Fake news about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can discourage people from taking preventive measures (masks, social distancing), thereby increasing infections and deaths; thus, this study tests whether attributes of users or COVID-19 tweets can distinguish tweets of true news versus fake news. We analyzed 4,165 spell-checked English tweets with a link to 1 of 20 matched COVID-19 news stories (10 true and 10 fake), across the world during 1 year, via computational linguistics and advanced statistics. Tweets with common words, negative emotional valence, higher arousal, greater dominance, first person singular pronouns, third person pronouns or by users with more followers were more likely to be true news tweets. By contrast, tweets with second person pronouns, bald starts, or hedges were more likely to be fake news tweets. Accuracy (F1 score) was 95%. While some tweet attributes for detecting fake news might be universal (pronouns, politeness, followers), others might be topic specific (common words, emotions, hedges).

Emotion-dependent language featuring depression

Background and objectivesUnderstanding language features of depression contributes to the detection of the disorder. Considering that depression is characterized by dysfunctions in emotion and individuals with depression often show emotion-dependent cognition, the present study investigated the speech features and word use of emotion-dependent narrations in patients with depression. MethodsForty depression patients and forty controls were required to narrate self-relevant memories under five basic human emotions (i.e., sad, angry, fearful, neutral, and happy). Recorded speech and transcribed texts were analyzed. ResultsPatients with depression, as compared to non-depressed individuals, talked slower and less. They also performed differently in using negative emotion, work, family, sex, biology, health, and assent words regardless of emotion manipulation. Moreover, the use of words such as first person singular pronoun, past tense, causation, achievement, family, death, psychology, impersonal pronoun, quantifier and preposition words displayed emotion-dependent differences between groups. With the involvement of emotion, linguistic indicators associated with depressive symptoms were identified and explained 71.6% variances of depression severity. LimitationsWord use was analyzed based on the dictionary which does not cover all the words spoken in the memory task, resulting in text data loss. Besides, a relatively small number of depression patients were included in the present study and therefore the results need confirmation in future research using big emotion-dependent data of speech and texts. ConclusionsOur findings suggest that consideration of different emotional contexts is an effective means to improve the accuracy of depression detection via the analysis of word use and speech features.

The Impersonal Use of German 1st Person SingularIch

This article replies to Ackema and Neeleman’s (2018) claim that 1st person singular pronouns are grammatically blocked from having impersonal uses. In connection with this claim, they argue that the impersonal use of German 1st person singular ich described in Zobel 2014 does not exist. I show that Ackema and Neeleman’s alternative analysis of the German data analyzed in Zobel 2014 is flawed, and that new considerations inspired by their proposal further support the claim that German ich has an impersonal use. This result has ramifications not only for Ackema and Neeleman’s account of the morphosyntax and semantics of (impersonally usable) personal pronouns, but also for anyone researching the morphosyntax and semantics of pronominal expressions and how these interact.

“Being careful”: How much caution is enough? The relational context of fear of older adult falling in older adult-family caregiver dyads

Family caregivers play an important role in coping with older adult falls; however, their perspectives on fear of older adult falling are lacking from the falls prevention literature. A mixed-method design (N=25 dyads) with interview and survey data examined linguistic characteristics and coping strategies used by older adult and family caregiver dyads to manage fear of older adult falling. Fear of older adult falling consisted of both affective (e.g., worry) and cognitive (e.g., cautious) properties. Family caregivers more frequently used affective words and first-person plural pronouns (“we” language) when talking about fear of older adult falling, while older adults more frequently used cognitive and first-and-second person singular pronouns (“I”, “you”). The concept of “being careful” was shared within dyads. However, dyad partners differed in their perspectives of what constituted “being careful” and the possibilities of future falling. Findings suggest that the need for family-centered interventions to prevent falls are needed.

A more special use of the third person singular pronoun in Shanghainese

Abstract This paper investigates the syntax and semantics of the third person singular pronoun ɦi⁶ in Shanghainese in its non-referential use. Evidence from its phonological dependence and syntactic integration with the preceding host verb is presented to show that the non-referential ɦi⁶ is a clitic. It is further observed that this use of ɦi⁶ requires licensing from the [+subjunctive] feature, echoing Qian (2004) and Jin (2016). However, my analysis diverges from theirs in treating the ɦi⁶ in question as an expletive licensed by the [+subjunctive] feature, rather than a subjunctive marker itself on grounds that it is not obligatory in a subjunctive sentence and that the subjunctivity must always be encoded by other elements in the sentence. ɦi⁶ in this use serves as an emphatic, strengthening the effect of deontic or imperative force in subjunctive contexts. Furthermore, it is shown that the licensing must obey a locality condition, whereby the expletive ɦi⁶ must be licensed by a c-commanding licenser in its local domain. From the perspective of grammaticalization, I propose that ɦi⁶ is going through an intermediate stage of becoming a purely modal functional marker. A final stage of this “upward” grammaticalization can be found in the expletive use of the third person pronoun keoi in Cantonese, which has become a more grammaticalized marker that has scope over the sentence. It is pointed out that the development of the expletive pronoun suggests that being at the right-periphery is a crucial factor in motivating and facilitating grammaticalization in Chinese. Last, a comparison between the non-referential ɦi⁶ and the Mandarin non-referential third person pronoun ta in the V-ta-ge-NP/AP construction is presented, showing that both cases manifest interactions between VP-internal projections and higher functional categories.

Kajian Semiotika dalam Sajak “Bilang” dan “Memilikimu” Karya Tere Liye

The article entitled Semiotic Studies in the Poems "Bilang" and "Memilikimu" by Tere Liye is a semiotic study that discusses two poems by Tere Liye entitled, "Memilikimu" and "Bilang". The purpose of this research is to produce an interpretation that contains the theme of humanity with the problem of love in the two poems and to describe the meaning through signs that produce interpretations through the study of Semiotics. Analysis of the two titles of this poem uses a qualitative descriptive method. The approach used is Aart Van Zoest's semiotic approach. The technique that we use is the reading technique. The researcher reads the entire poem and then records the words, phrases and clauses to find signs that result in an interpretation that contains the theme of humanity with the value of love in the two poems. The results of the research are the poems entitled "Bilang" and "Memilikimu" which contain the theme of humanity which contains the meaning of love that does not reach and cannot have. In both poems, the dominance of incomplete sentence patterns was found, the dominance of phrases/words with meaningful denotations, and five figures of speech were found, including repetition, cynicism, allegory, hyperbole and parallelism. Meanwhile, the isotopes used in the two poems are character isotope, perception isotope, movement isotope, nature isotope, human isotope and space isotope. I lyrics in both poems use singular personal pronouns and plural personal pronouns. In addition, these poems are advice from poets to readers regarding matters of love.

ГЕНДЕРНАЯ СПЕЦИФИКА САМОПРЕЗЕНТАЦИИ СОВРЕМЕННЫХ БРИТАНСКИХ ПОЛИТИКОВ

The purpose of this article is to study the gender specificity of the self-presentation strategy of modern politicians in the UK, identified during the election campaign of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss from June to September 2022.The material of the study was the texts of political debates published on the Internet.The relevance of the research is determined by the insufficient study of the politician's self-presentation strategy gender aspect in the texts of pre-election debates. After analyzing the debate materials, it can be stated that Liz Truss's speech is distinguished by assertiveness and moderate emotionality, expressed through such communicative means as the usage of the first person singular personal pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, anaphora and metaphor. In 75% of the considering cases, the personal pronoun of the first person singular is dominated, in 12% Liz Truss uses the demonstrative pronoun, in 6% – the metaphor and in 6% the politician uses the anaphora.In addition, the candidate for prime minister demonstrates his own competence in matters of domestic politics and economics, actively using the terminological apparatus, which contributes to a successful self-presentation. In turn, Rishi Sunak's speech is characterized by confidence, particularity, reasoning, focusing the attention of the electorate on his best qualities, represented by the use of the first person singular pronoun, the active use of verbs in the future tense, as well as stylistic means such as metaphor. As a result of the analysis, it was found that in 55% of the examples the candidate for prime minister uses the personal pronoun of the first person singular, in 33% verbs in the future tense dominate, and in 11% – metaphor.The study showed that the gender characteristics of the two politicians at the verbal level do not have significant differences. Both policies generally use the same set of language features.

Emotional Competencies of Students and Psycholinguistic Characteristics of Their Texts Written under Conditions of Situational Stress: Relationship Issues

The author deals with the relationship between the psycholinguistic characteristics of the text, as indicators of psycho-emotional states in conditions of situational stress, and the level of developed emotional competencies, i.e., the ability to understand and manage one’s own and others’ emotions. An empirical study was conducted on a student sample using the EmIn Questionnaire by D.V. Lyusin, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) by Ch.D. Spielberger and the Prognoz-2 Questionnaire by V.Yu. Rybnikov. The students who took part in the experiment wrote texts under situational stress, for which psycholinguistic indicators were calculated. The results of the study were analyzed using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. The data obtained confirmed the positive relationship between the emotional competencies of the students under conditions of situational stress and such psycholinguistic characteristics of their written texts as the Treiger index, the action objectification index, the use of the “subject of assistance” syntaxeme, which reflect emotional and cognitive tension, desire and determination to act and help others, as well as the negative relationship with the coefficient of aggressiveness, the first person singular pronouns, the use of the “predicate” and “causative” syntaxemes, which are markers of uncontrolled aggression, suspicion, egocentric position, search for emotional positive support from the outside, and avoidance reactions. The assumption about the relationship of emotional competences with manifestations of situational (“state”) and personal (“trait”) anxiety, as well as the likelihood of neuropsychic breakdowns in a stressful situation, was not confirmed. As a result of the study, general psycholinguistic indicators of the manifestations of situational anxiety and the formation of emotional competences were determined - these are the action objectification index and aggressiveness index. This suggests that both the ability to understand and regulate the emotions of other people, and situational anxiety, as a reactive state of the subjective experience of anxiety, tension, concern, when writing a text in a stressful situation, can be marked by an increase in number of verbs and verb forms used in the text, syntactic incompleteness of statements and a decrease in their socialization.

Gender-Neutral Pronouns He and They

This paper attempts to investigate the Korean EFL students’ understanding of singular they in comparison with gender-neutral he. When it comes to the choice of third person singular pronouns in gender-indeterminant contexts, prescriptive grammar prefers gender-neutral he, while descriptive grammar recommends singular they, among other alternative pronoun forms. As grammar books and guideline sources gradually adopt singular they as a proper, or a better, pronoun candidate compared to gender-neutral he, an experimental study was designed to examine how Korean learners of English acquire this recent language change in EFL contexts. In a naturalness judgment task, the Korean EFL learners judged singular they in informal contexts as less natural than in formal contexts and even as unnatural when the antecedents included ‘every/any,’ though it has been reported that native speakers prefer singular they in informal contexts rather than in formal contexts.

THE POWER OF UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT: PERSONAL PRONOUNS ON ZELENSKY’S SPEECH

This study analyzes how Zelensky used first-person personal pronounsin his political speeches. This study discussed about the occurrences offirst personal pronouns in political speeches by using qualitativemethodologies, that is document study to identify their forms anddiscourse function. The results showed that The first personal pronounsare identified in discovered of Zelensky’s speeches. The first personalpronouns used in Zelensky addresses were pronoun “I”, “You”, and “We”.Zelensky used the singular personal pronoun ‘‘I’’ to express his heartfeltgratitude and admiration, as well as his professional and personalexperiences, arguments, perspectives, aspirations, and commitment. Theusage of inclusive “You” and variants indicate Zelensky 's willingness toshare responsibility, foster unity, equality, and public declarations abouttheir current situation and any potential future challenges. Usingexclusive “We” which demonstrated by Zelensky also was to show hispolitical intentions, commitment, political experiences during theelection, and significant concern for reconciliation.

Авторская модальность и способы ее репрезентации в поэтическом дискурсе (на материале стихотворения американского поэта Э.А. По «Ворон»)

The article is devoted to scrutinizing the ways of manifesting the author’s modality in the poetic discourse as exemplified by E.A. Poe’s poem «The Raven». The relevance of the study is determined by the anthropocentric perspective of modern linguistics, which focuses on the problem of the implementation of «a person within a language». Being one of the most relevant objects for research, literary discourse is regarded in terms of identifying the specifics of the idiolect and idiostyle of a creative linguistic personality. In this respect, the author’s modality, based on the implementation of modal and evaluative meanings in the text, is verbalized by means of semantic dominants of the author’s individual worldview. The article is aimed at studying multi-level linguistic means of representing the category of author’s modality in the poetic discourse of a narrative poem. A complex set of methods has been applied in the course of the study, including those of linguapoetic, component, stylistic analyses as well as certain elements of the structural and semantic, communicative and pragmatic, and interpretative approaches. It has been found that the specific features of E.A. Poe’s idiostyle are manifested within the framework of the author’s modality, while the modal dominants of the author’s idiolect can be spotted based on the analysis of the author’s choice of modal means. The study has also revealed that textual (author’s) modality is implemented on all the levels of poetic text organization. Alliteration and assonance, the internal rhyme and the rhymes at the end of the lines being the phonetic means of textual modality; lexical means of verbalizing the author’s modality are represented by the frequently used emotionally colored verbs, adjectives and adverbs (including those with negative connotations), as well as verbs with voluntative semantics, alongside with a very limited use of explicit grammatical means (e.g., the imperative). Syntactic means of the author’s modality are characterized by the use of a variety of syntactic repetitions. The author’s subjective worldview is explicated by the frequent use of the first person singular pronoun within the modal sphere of E.A. Poe’s poem “The Raven”.

Emotional and cognitive changes surrounding online depression identity claims.

As social media has proliferated, a key aspect to making meaningful connections with people online has been revealing important parts of one's identity. In this work, we study changes that occur in people's language use after they share a specific piece of their identity: a depression diagnosis. To do so, we collect data from over five thousand users who have made such a statement, which we refer to as an identity claim. Prior to making a depression identity claim, the Reddit user's language displays evidence of increasingly higher rates of anxiety, sadness, and cognitive processing language compared to matched controls. After the identity claim, these language markers decrease and more closely match the controls. Similarly, first person singular pronoun usage decreases following the identity claim, which was previously previously found to be indicative of self-focus and associated with depression. By further considering how and to whom people express their identity, we find that the observed longitudinal changes are larger for those who do so in ways that are more correlated with seeking help (sharing in a post instead of a comment; sharing in a mental health support forum). This work suggests that there may be benefits to sharing one's depression diagnosis, especially in a semi-anonymous forum where others are likely to be empathetic.

Discourse function of personal pronouns in a slavic pro-drop language: Evidence from Croatian L1 argumentative writing

Abstract At the discourse level, personal pronouns have been acknowledged as one of the most important features used to express writer visibility – involvement of the author in the text. Studies have shown that writer visibility depends on discourse type, cultural conventions, writer’s L1, etc. (Petch-Tyson 1998; Ädel 2001; Rodríguez, Vázquez and Guzmán 2011; Zolotova 2014). This paper investigates the discourse function of personal pronouns in argumentative writing in the Croatian language, a Slavic pro-drop language. For the purpose of this paper argumentative essays written by Croatian native speakers (N=100) are analysed for the frequencies of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns and their discourse functions. The results confirmed low frequency of 1st and 2nd person personal pronouns in the corpus, with the dominance of the 1st person singular personal pronoun I. The qualitative analysis shows that the pronoun I is most frequently used to express discourse functions of writer’s stance and writer’s experience, whereas all of the other pronouns were used mostly to express more general claims. The obtained results gave more insight into the use of personal pronouns in a pro-drop language and confirm cultural and linguistic influences on argumentative writing in the first language.

A corpus-based investigation of the English translations of Mao Zedong's speeches.

This study adopts a corpus-based approach to examine the linguistic features manifested in the English translations of Mao Zedong's speeches, taking Winston Churchill's speeches (representative of normalized spoken texts) and the spoken texts in BNC Sampler (representative of original spoken texts) as the reference corpora. By investigating the macro- and micro-linguistic features, it is found that the translated Mao's speeches (both direct and inverse translations) differ from normalized spoken texts as well as original spoken texts in three aspects: (i) macro-linguistic features, (ii) the use of personal pronouns, (iii) the use of modal verbs. In terms of macro-linguistic features, the average word length of the English translations is higher than that of normalized spoken texts and that of original spoken texts; the standardized type/token ratio and average sentence length of the English translations are higher than those of original spoken texts, but lower than those of normalized spoken texts. Meanwhile, in terms of the use of personal pronouns, the English translations of Mao's speeches prefer the underuse of the first person singular pronoun I. Furthermore, as far as modal verbs are concerned, the English translations of Mao's speeches prefer the overuse of must and should on the one hand, and the underuse of shall, could, may, and would on the other hand. Therefore, it can be said that the translated Mao's speeches exhibit some particular linguistic features, which can not only be differentiated from normalized spoken texts, but also be distinguished from original spoken texts. They are in a middle position in relation to normalized spoken texts as well as original spoken texts. This in-betweenness not only exhibits Mao's creative and idiosyncratic language use, but also reflects the influence of the language transfer from Chinese into English.