The Referential Ambiguity Of Personal Pronouns And Its Pragmatic Consequences

Download or read book The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns written by Laure Gardelle and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.