| Kommentar |
Pronouns have a tendency to fly under our linguistic radar – if at all, we perceive them as ”little words”, as function items that simply help to maintain efficient linguistic interaction. However, a closer look reveals that there is much more to pronouns: because they encode social categories and interpersonal relations, they play a vital part in making our language the ”social glue” that shapes communities. By analyzing the English pronominal system, we will not only learn about structural properties of English; pronouns also provide a window onto the history and evolution of the language; onto global varieties of English; and onto the sociopragmatic dynamics that play out when speakers interact.
This class will set out with a structural approach to the English pronominal system, analyzing the pronoun paradigm and its history and discussing core properties such as anaphora and deixis, and issues such as word class, case, and reference. After that, we will focus on the many sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of pronoun use: terms of address and the dynamics of power and solidarity; global variation and change in pronoun use and prescriptivist stances; gendered language and the role of pronouns in the debate on language and gender. We will draw on a variety of real-world data and use our knowledge on pronouns to do discourse analysis. |
| Literatur |
Pennebaker, James W. 2011/pbk. 2013. The Secret Life of Pronouns. N.Y.: Bloomsbury
Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: CUP.
Further readings, in particular research papers, will be announced and made available at the beginning of the semester.
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