Pronominal Use Research Articles

On the optionality in L2 pronominal production and interpretation

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion pertaining to the source of optionality in second language (L2) pronominal interpretation. We examined pronominal use not only in L2 English adverbial – adjunct CP clauses (‘The student was upset because he had failed the test’), but also in English VP-coordination structures (‘Jane had studied hard and (she) passed the exam’), an area which has never been investigated before. While English adjunct CP clauses represent a context in which overt pronominal subjects are obligatory, in VP-coordination pronouns can be apparently dropped. These structures were tested by means of two English production tasks: a Sentence Completion task and a Cloze Test. Our results showed that compared to the English controls the Greek learners used (a) significantly more ungrammatical null subjects in adjunct CP clauses and, crucially, (b) significantly more overt pronominal subjects in VP-coordination structures. After examining two possible accounts for the observed optionality, namely, the Interface Hypothesis and the Interpretability Hypothesis, we argue that a language internal syntax explanation best addresses our data both in the adjunct CP clauses and in the VP-coordination structures.

Zamjenice u hrvatskim političkim govorima

This paper analyzes the use of Croatian personal pronouns and possessive adjectives in two political speeches delivered by two politicians from ideologically different parties. This includes the distribution of linguistic units and the strategies by which the speakers change pronouns and their corresponding referents and polarize their speech. We also study whether the change of referents results in the manipulation of listeners, or in the emphasis of political authority, party adherence and patriotism and whether the pronominal use also refl ects certain political ideology. The methodology used in this paper relies on the analytical critical discourse analysis framework, which offers tools for a critical approach to discourse. The speech act theory and the politeness principle are also drawn upon.

The objective conjugation in Hungarian: agreement without phi-features

Verbal agreement is normally in person, number and gender, but Hungarian verbs agree with their objects in definiteness instead: a Hungarian verb appears in the objective conjugation when it governs a definite object. The sensitivity of the objective conjugation suffixes to the definiteness of the object has been attributed to the supposition that they function as incorporated object pronouns (Szamosi 1974; den Dikken 2006), but we argue instead that they are agreement markers registering the object’s formal, not semantic, definiteness. Evidence comes from anaphoric binding, null anaphora (pro-drop), extraction islands, and the insensitivity of the objective conjugation to any of the factors known to condition the use of affixal and clitic pronominals. We propose that the objective conjugation is triggered by a formal definiteness feature and offer a grammar that determines, for a given complement of a verb, whether it triggers the objective conjugation on the verb. Although the objective conjugation suffixes are not pronominal, they are thought to derive historically from incorporated pronouns (Hajdu 1972), and we suggest that while referentiality and ϕ-features were largely lost, an association with topicality led to a formal condition of object definiteness. The result is an agreement marker that lacks ϕ-features.

Systematic repetition of the first person singular pronoun wo in Mandarin conversation

While repetition was once thought to be “just a marker of a ‘disfluent’ or ‘sloppy’ speaker,” it has been increasingly recognized as a “human social activity, clearly part of our everyday conduct or behavior” (Schegloff 1987). The present study, using video recorded natural conversation data, aims to describe ways in which native speakers of Mandarin Chinese employ repetition of the first person pronoun wo for interactional moves. Repetition of wo is analyzed in conjunction with other interactive strategies, such as syntactic features, phonological features, pragmatic features, gesture, self-grooming, and gaze, as a way to organize and negotiate stances toward the proposition expressed and the co-participants and at the same time to enable intersubjectivity. By showing that within the speech of a single speaker pronominal repetition acts as a stance marker, this paper provides a new perspective on Chinese pronominal use and enriches our understanding of the functions of “disfluent” language in general.

‘Do we really want to be like them?’: Indexing Europeanness through pronominal use

This article is part of a larger project on language politics in the European Union (EU), with an empirical focus on questions concerning identity. Using Wortham’s (1996) deictic mapping technique, I examine how EU leaders position themselves with respect to a European identity through the use of pronouns. Using this discourse analytic framework, I show how, in a panel featuring leaders from current and prospective EU member states, a participant from Turkey juxtaposes his various identity positions with those of other panel members. The analysis focuses on short discourse fragments featuring discussions about European identity. The analysis reveals three identities constructed through pronoun use: neutral, non-European, and European. While leaders from current member states emphasize their Europeanness through pronoun use, the Turkish panelist portrays an identity in opposition to this European identity, thus exhibiting how the repetition of pronoun use patterns helps to create, recreate, and make visible certain identities.

Development of English referring expressions in the narratives of Chinese–English bilinguals

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages – five, eight, ten, and young adults – using the wordless picture bookFrog, where are you?(Mayer, 1969). Narrative analysis focused on the referring expressions that the L2 speakers used to introduce and maintain reference to story characters in the narratives and on the referential appropriateness of those expressions. We then compared the results of this study with other, similar studies on children learning English as a first language (L1) and found both universal and L2-specific patterns in the development of referring expressions in discourse. On the one hand, regardless of whether English is acquired as an L1 or L2, appropriate use of referring expressions in discourse is developed gradually and is influenced by both discourse function (introduction vs. maintenance) and character type (main vs. secondary). On the other hand, L2 children in our study differed from L1 children in previous studies in the development of referential appropriateness in character introduction, the use of pronominals for referent maintenance, and the timeline of the mastery of appropriate forms for referent introductions versus referent maintenance.

Ore and omae

First- and second-person pronouns have been one of the centerpieces of the literature on language and gender differences in Japanese (Shibamoto Smith 2003). Most of our understandings of real (empirical) pronominal use comes from investigations of female speakers of standard Japanese. Our understandings of how dialect speakers and/or men use pronominal forms in daily linguistic practice are not well informed. This article undertakes an investigation of Japanese men’s uses of pronominal forms; each participant was born and reared in the Kansai (western) area of Japan and uses a dialect variety of Japanese (Hanshinkan Dialect). Literature which addresses pronominal usage in Japanese indicates that these forms are risky since they always serve to position speaker and hearer in specific ways relative to one another; as such, pronouns are something to be avoided. The findings of this paper indicate that pronouns are used by Japanese men; however the uses are contextually governed and have little to do with delineating speaker from hearer and have more to do with specific conversational goals.

‘Is it alright if I-um-we unbutton your pyjama top now?’ Pronominal use in bedside teaching encounters

Individuals' pronominal talk can signify how they conceptualize themselves, others and their relationships. Although studies have analysed healthcare professionals' use of pronouns within the doctor-patient relationship, none have explored this within the 'learning triad' of the bedside teaching encounter (BTE). We aim to address this gap in the literature by considering the functions of pronouns in the talk of physician tutors, students and patients during BTEs. We analysed the use and function of pronouns (I, we, you and they), pronoun shifts and the collocate 'think' in the talk of five tutors, ten students and six patients within six BTEs. Our analysis suggested that participants' pronominal talk served multiple functions. We discuss the varied functions of BTE participants'pronominal talk and consider what their pronouns reveal about their understanding of each other and their relationships. Further research is needed with a more diverse sample, including younger patients, and across different settings like general practice, to explore the full diversity of pronominal talk within BTEs.

Romans à contraintes

Roman à contraintes is essentially an anthology of critical pieces of varying length published originally between 1991 and 2002. The range of coverage is wide: eleven mostly late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century writers discussed in a 190-page volume. Part 1 comprises an introduction to Jean-Benoît Puech's work situating it briefly in relation to that of his literary and theoretical mentors, Louis-René des Forêts and Gérard Genette, and three subsections considering the relationship between text and peritext, the paradoxical play between narrative voice and pronominal use, and the topos of the found manuscript. Part 2 examines the use of analogy as constraining principle: in Jean Paulhan's Le Guerrier appliqué the banality of the analogies expresses the astonishment of the protagonist and the comparatist reflex that his disorientation triggers; in Claude Ollier's La Mise en scène, analogy is a stage on the way to the ‘mot juste’; close reading of an extract from José Lezama Lima's Paradiso reveals the dynamic interaction between intergenerational conflict and the structural exploitation of metaphor. Part 3 investigates the tension between subject and ‘constraint’, focusing on the presence of a ‘narrateur maniaquement anonyme’ in Robert Pinget's Le Libéra (p. 119), the play between overstated pastiche and literary hoax in Jean Lahougue's Comptine des Height and La Doublure de Magrite, and grammatextuality and typography in Raymond Federman's Amer Eldorado. Part 4 claims that what Baetens calls the ‘prose prosaïque’ of Bernard Colin and Ernst Junger (p. 147) calls into question the distinction between constraint and non-constraint. Part 5 explores the compatibility of the ‘hors-sujet’ (here, digression and citation) and constraint in Jacques Roubaud's Poésie and Renaud Camus's Vaisseaux brûlés, and examines the impact of electronic media on writing practice. Among the volume's qualities, I would cite the following: the analysis of Puech brings into focus a body of work that has been overshadowed by the author's relationship with des Forêts; the sections on Paulhan, Ollier and Lezama Lima complement each other and offer suggestive insights into their work; Baetens revives usefully the question of the heritage of the nouveau roman; the topic of the ‘roman à contrainte’ is potentially very rich. However, despite the efforts to establish overarching thematic links, the essays remain autonomous units within an anthology and the principles underlying the inclusion of authors are not always clear: in particular, the presence of Colin's Perpétuel voyez Physique and Junger's Jardins et Routes is surprising. The introduction is brief and, though it promises ‘de nouveaux éléments à une théorie générale de la contrainte’ (p. 12), I would have welcomed fuller argument to support some of the book's assertions. Ricardou, Magné, Lejeune, Barthes and Genette are mentioned, but the implications of this contextualization are not pursued. This is especially regrettable in the case of Genette, given Puech's collaboration with him and Baetens's — fully justified — insistence on the latter's status as an author who is theoretically ‘averti’. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Baetens can be commended for tackling a difficult subject and a number of under-researched authors.

Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion

Syntactic simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical complexity of a text, while retaining its information content and meaning. The aim of syntactic simplification is to make text easier to comprehend for human readers, or process by programs. In this paper, we formalise the interactions that take place between syntax and discourse during the simplification process. This is important because the usefulness of syntactic simplification in making a text accessible to a wider audience can be undermined if the rewritten text lacks cohesion. We describe how various generation issues like sentence ordering, cue-word selection, referring-expression generation, determiner choice and pronominal use can be resolved so as to preserve conjunctive and anaphoric cohesive relations during syntactic simplification and present the results of an evaluation of our syntactic simplification system.

Personal perspective in TV news interviews

Two interviews by Christiane Amanpour televized September 8, 2000 on CNN, one with Ehud Barak and one with Yasser Arafat were analyzed for indicators of personal perspective. Generally, use of the same indicators as in Suleiman, O’Connell, & Kowal (2002) was confirmed: Number of syllables spoken; use of first-person singular and plural pronominals and second-person pronominals; hesitations; smooth and interruptive turn transitions; and questions posed by interviewees. The interview with Arafat was extraordinarily agonistic, as manifested in his excessive use of first-person singular and second-person pronominals, hesitations, questions, and interruptions. For her part, Amanpour incited the shift to agonism with her provocative questioning. She then moved toward a more personal perspective by speaking proportionally more and by using more first-person singular pronominals and hesitations, all the while still maintaining her professional style of smooth turn transition. The dialogical character of personal perspective is discussed.

Episodic Boundaries in Conversational Narratives

This study attempts to integrate linguistic and discourse analysis to investigate the way narrators demarcate episodic boundaries in conversational settings and hypothesize about the kind of cognitive processes that might be involved in such an activity. In contrast to previous research in this area which predominately relies on experimentally designed text, this study draws on naturalistic data and relies on the notion that narrators in conversational setting interactionally create narrative by recruiting discourse skills that are most readily available to them. The study reveals that narrators in conversational settings employ reference (i.e. use of noun phrases and anaphors) and macropropositions following a general pattern. Generally, episode boundaries are marked both by macropropositions and full noun phrases. Noun phrases are often used to indicate the beginning of an episode, whereas pronominals are often used within episode boundaries suggesting the continuation of the current episode. The co-occurrence of macropropositions and NPs in demarcating episodic boundaries reflects the bidirectional process operating simultaneously within the linguistic and conceptual domains that is involved in the production of narratives. The use of pronominals within the episode boundaries indicates that cognitive mechanisms such as sustaining attention is also involved in demarcation of episodic boundaries.

A new rule for the Queen and I?

A fresh perspective on the prescription-versus-description debate, including a new approach to such pronominal (ab)use as ‘between you and I’

The Strategies of Politeness in the Chinese Language (review)

296 China Review International: Vol. ?, No. ?, Spring 1994 Studies in China; they are problems that still exist today. Inclusion ofa briefdiscussion of such issues, with views from both the American and Chinese sides, would have been a valuable addition to the directory. Frank Tang University ofHawai'i Kaidi Zhan. The Strategies ofPoliteness in the ChineseLanguage Berkeley: Institute ofEast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 1992. xv, 106 pp. This is a compact book about a very complicated subject: the linguistic means and strategies for achieving politeness in Mandarin Chinese. Authored by a native Chinese speaker, the bulk ofit consists of conversational snippets and utterances and capsule explanations cataloged under the typology of universal politeness strategies developed earlier by anthropologically trained linguists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. In constructing their typology, Brown and Levinson had treated face—and the avoidance of face threats to self and others— as the underlying imperative for much of routine polite communication; in addition , they regarded politeness as the underlying imperative for many deviations from maximally efficient communication. The author's Chinese examples are largely culled from contemporary Chinese literature, the Chinese classic Dream ofthe Red Chamber, and recorded conversations; they are presented in both simplified characters and pinyin, followed by their English translation. Throughout, the author tries to compare and contrast differences in politeness choices and conventions between Chinese and English speakers, and to explain their potential for cross-cultural confusion. Linguist Robin Lakoffprovides a lengthy preface to help acquaint the reader with the book's pragmatic focus, its intended audience (linguists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, language learners, and teachers), and to underscore the pertinence ofpoliteness to comparative understandings of sociability and culture. In her introductory chapter, the author presents some distinctive grammatical possibilities available to Chinese politeness strategies. Chinese, for example, has special suffixes, particles, and reduplicated verbs that can be used either to soften or to vivify or to convey cooperation or commiseration. The author also attributes Chinese politeness strategies to unique cultural and psychological incopyright \994fluences. Theyinclude a traditional sense ofsocial hierarchy, strong kin sentiby University ofments, the Confucian Doctrine ofthe Mean and the Confucian stress on modHawai 'i Presseration, and other values such as modesty, prudence, kindness, compassion, Reviews 297 solicitousness, optimism, showing respect to one's elders and betters, and putting others first. She enlists these language-specific and culture-specific features in her next three chapters to illustrate Chinese versions of the three superpoliteness strategies charted by Brown and Levinson: (1) positive, that is, "familiar," politeness— redressive speech that seeks to develop greater warmth and closeness between interlocutors by showing special regard for the addressee's virtues, abilities, possessions , achievements, or condition; (2) negative, that is, "respectful," politeness— redressive speech that is distancing and seeks to preserve an addressee's need for privacy, autonomy, or freedom from imposition; and (3) off-record politeness— redressive speech delivered roundaboutly or ambiguously in a way that, in effect, lets a speaker offthe hook or, at least, doesn't put anyone on the spot. The first two superpoliteness strategies are complementary on-record strategies that, writes the author, are more elaborate and more frequently used than are offrecord politeness strategies among Chinese. In their positive politeness strategies, for example, Chinese might address others (i.e., neighbors, friends, and even strangers and serious lovers) as kinfolk; they might also signal their commonality in dialect or locality, or give explicit recognition to their shared status as old schoolmates or former work mates, or they might lexically acknowledge a master-apprentice, teacher-student relationship . At other times, Chinese might shift to the addressee's reference point by substituting the verb complement -qu"go" for -Zai"come" or by switching from speaker focus to speaker-addressee focus through specialized pronominal use, that is, zanmen "inclusive we" or ni (jiu) shuo "you (just) say." They avoid disagreements by offering vague responses, token agreements, or white lies. Unlike English, which uses conventional, generalized forms, Chinese greetings are concretely directed to an addressee's health ("Have you recovered yet?") or to whether the addressee has taken a meal yet ("Have you had your breakfast/lunch/ dinner?"), and their partings are full ofgentle admonishments about safety ("Be careful...

The Issue of Grammaticalization in Early German Second Language

This paper treats the development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in the early second language acquisition of Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day-care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin. We examine case and gender marking on noun phrases and pronouns and tense/aspect and agreement marking on verb phrases. These are examined in light of the following general issues: (a) Do grammatical markers develop from independent lexical items in child language as well as in diachronic development? (b) Do the markers initially mark pragmatic categories before being grammaticalized as syntactic functors? (c) Do grammaticalizations of the first language influence the development of the second language?We find no evidence that pragmatic precede syntactic categories; however, some evidence indicates that grammatical markers develop first as independent words—for example, pronominal use preceding definite article use ofder, die, das, and main verb use preceding auxiliary use ofsein(‘be’) andhaben(‘have’). Some evidence that the categories of the first language (Turkish) play a role in the development of German second language is found in compound verb constructions.

The Writer, the Reader, and the Scientific Text

Using examples from journal articles in the natural sciences, the author argues that scientific writing has conventions of personality which are rhetorically constrained. Writers represent themselves and their readers at specific junctures in the text through the use of pronominals, verbs entailing reasoning, modals expressing possibility or obligation, and adjectives or adverbs which qualify assertions. Seven rhetorical acts are identified which are likely to bring the writer and/or the reader to the surface of the text: 1) acknowledging assistance; 2) referring to one's own research; 3) justifying hypothesis selection; 4) justifying methods chosen or departures from established methods; 5) explaining adjustments to results or inability to interpret results; 6) stating conclusions and comparing conclusions to those of other studies; and 7) discussing implications for reader behavior.

Some possibilities of the absolute pronoun in Xhosa

Some of the possibly erratic behaviour of the absolute pronoun in Xhosa was examined: its possibility of floating like a quantifier; its pronominal use; head of an NP; its function as subject and c...

Pragmatically controlled anaphora

The use of anaphoric pronominalizations without linguistic antecedents is investigated. The absence of co-referring full forms is accounted for in certain instances by the contextual salience of the referent for both speaker and nearer. Other instances of the use of pro-nominals can only be accounted for in terms of egocentric control by the speaker. An explanation for the phenomenon is presented in terms of what speakers treat as ‘given’ elements in spoken discourse.

Sibling Terms as Used by Marriage Partners

In several societies of Southeast Asia, consanguineal kinship terms are used as nouns, pronouns, and prename titles. As nouns they refer only to consanguineal kin but as pronouns they include affinal kin as well, and the choice of term is determined by the generational level. Since marriage partners are affinal kin of the same generation, their only possible choice among consanguineal terms for pronominal use is the sibling terms. Such use is normal and uncomplicated, and involves no serious ambiguity. But the same usage is found in the Min (Fukienese) dialect of Taiwan, where one form of marriage prescribes that the intended bride be raised as a younger sister in the same household with her intended husband. In this case the use of sibling terms must at some point give rise to an ambiguity which might well be the cause of almost intolerable embarrassment. How the ambiguity is handled in this type of marriage arrangement is a matter needing further investigation.

On the Pronominal Use of ὁ αὐτός in Plato

Previous articleNext article FreeOn the Pronominal Use of ὁ αὐτός in PlatoJ. ElmoreJ. Elmore Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 3, Number 2Apr., 1908 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/359155 Views: 37 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.