Person

Abstract

This textbook deals with the grammatical category of person, which covers the first person, the second person, and the third person. Drawing on data from over 700 languages, Anna Siewierska compares the use of person within and across different languages, and examines the factors underlying this variation. She shows how person forms vary in substance, in the nature of the semantic distinctions they convey, in how they are used in sentences and discourse, and in the way they function to convey social distinctions. By looking at different types of person forms in the grammatical and social contexts in which they are used, this book documents an underlying unity between them, arguing against the treatment of person markers based on arbitrary sets of morphological and syntactic properties. Clearly organized and accessibly written, it will be welcomed by students and scholars of linguistics, particularly those interested in grammatical categories and their use.

Generic uses of the second person singular – how speakers deal with referential ambiguity and misunderstandings

“…However, if it is crosslinguistically common, there must be something about second person pronouns that makes them suitable for generic reference. Siewierska's (2004) typological study on person reveals that it is quite common for second person pronouns to have the possibility of generic reference. In Europe, it is even extremely common: it occurs both in Indo-European languages and in non-related languages like Finnish and Hungarian.…”

“…When an impersonal pronoun is felt as an instance of selfreference, it is often perceived as a way of avoiding responsibility (e.g., Jisa & Vigué 2005:128 (Siewierska 2004;Altenberg 2004/5), and Zifonun (2001:242) assumes German man to be "eine (manirierte, verhüllende oder distanzierende) Bezeichnungsalternative zu ich" ('an (affected, concealing or distancing) alternative for I'), which makes a strategic or even highly manipulative use possible.…”

“…According to Egerland (2003:74), Swedish man has, at least for some Swedish speakers, a flavour of modesty; they consider man to be a communicative strategy "when the speaker does not wish to emerge as the focus of attention". Modesty is even the main explanation for the self-referring use of the zero construction in Mandarin Chinese (Siewierska 2004). As for Finnish, it has been suggested that the zero construction for self-reference is a politeness strategy (Leinonen 1983;Hakulinen 1987).…”

Los generolectos del mojeño

“…Siewierska (2004Siewierska ( , 2011 solo menciona algunas lenguas con género en la primera o segunda persona, lo que puede ser analizado como género gramatical o como género indicial (Rose 2013c). Entretanto, la literatura sobre el género indicial (Fleming 2012, Dunn in press, Rose manuscrito) muestra que el dominio pronominal (o de referencia, incluyendo artículos, género gramatical y también clasificadores (Gerner and Bisang 2008)) es un dominio privilegiado para expresar el género indicial.…”

Variación paradigmática en los pronombres libres de primera persona no-singular en lenguas de la familia guaycurú

“…El trabajo está organizado de la siguiente manera: en la sección §2 se presenta el marco teórico en el que se fundamenta la investigación, es decir la tipología funcional, de acuerdo a lo planteado por Givón (2001) y Comrie (1989), entre otros, y específicamente, por Cysouw (2003) en lo que respecta a la estructura paradigmática de la marcación de persona en perspectiva translingüística. En la sección §3, se analizan los paradigmas de pronombres libres -o que poseen independencia morfológica y prosódica (Siewierska 2004: 56)-de primera persona no-singular en cada lengua, y en la sección §4 se compara la estructura paradigmática y se sitúa a las lenguas guaycurúes en un continuun de densidad de codificación de número en el complejo de primera persona. Por último, se incluyen reflexiones finales y posibles líneas de investigación a futuro.…”