scholarly journals WHAT DID WE JUST SEE? AMBIGUITY AND REVELATION IN THE EXTREME FIRST PERSON PLURAL

c i n d e r ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hayley Scrivenor
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
First Person ◽  
Los Alamos ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Contemporary Novels ◽  
Unnatural Narratology ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ambiguous Point

Questions of point of view are pivotal in fictional texts and determine what story, precisely, the author can tell. But what happens when writers present particularly challenging points of view? With a focus on the first person plural, this paper will interrogate stories where point of view ‘asserts’ itself to the reader. Using an approach informed by unnatural narratology, this paper addresses narrative situations where the make-up of a narrative collective is initially unclear, and where a challenging or ambiguous point of view is revealed to be an integral component of the plot.In exploring the relationship between point of view, ambiguity and narrative revelation, this paper will consider a range of contemporary novels written predominately in the first person plural, notably TaraShea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos, Malcolm Knox’s The Wonder Lover and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs. Highlighting the innate ambiguity of an ‘extreme’ first person plural allows us to consider ways in which authors of fiction in the first person plural have exploited this ambiguity to shape key revelations within their texts.

We are you: The plural and the dual in “we” fictional narratives

2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Marcus
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe essay discusses grammatical and narratological issues of first-person plural (“we”) narratives. It elaborates on the repercussions of Uri Margolin's argument (1996, 2000) regarding the semantic instability of the pronoun “we”, a feature that remains general and abstract in his formulation. Everyday language tends to conceal this instability, whereas some fictional narratives accentuate it, thereby actualizing the subversive potential of the first-person-plural pronoun and highlighting the relationship of the individual “I” to the “we” group and the relationship of this group to “others”. Like second-person narratives, first-person-plural narratives may transgress the boundary between the virtual and the actual and point to the absence of necessary connection between the grammatical form and its deictic function. The essay also proposes a distinction between plural and dual fictional narratives: due to their deictic properties, plural “we” narratives are frequently more destabilizing than dual “we” narratives, which are not characterized by semantic fluidity.

A deixis emocional em português europeu contemporâneo: alguns contributos

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-235
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Macário Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
First Person Plural

This paper is a contribution to the description of the structures that express emotional deixis, in European contemporary Portuguese. The analysis of our empirical data show that, in Portuguese, demonstratives are not the only category that encodes emotional deictic meaning; possessives and first person plural display the same function, in some contexts. It is also discussed the semantic bleaching of the deictic space adverbs cá and lá and it is argued that it can only be described and explained in illocutionary terms, and not in the framework of emotional deixis.

Colloquial features in Word Englishes

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Collins ◽  
Xinyue Yao
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
World Englishes ◽  
Evolutionary Status ◽  
First Person ◽  
Functional Interpretation ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
World English ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Grammatical Change

A powerful discourse-pragmatic agent of grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century has been the increasing acceptance of colloquialism. Little is known, however, about its influence on grammatical developments in regional varieties of World English other than the two inner circle ‘supervarieties’, British and American English. This paper reports findings from a corpus-based study of three grammatical categories known to be undergoing a colloquialism-related rise in contemporary English, across a range of registers in ten World Englishes: quasi-modals (have to, have got to, be going to, want to), get-passives, and first person plural inclusive let’s. In each case comparisons are drawn with non-colloquial variants: modals (must, should, will, shall), be-passives, and let us. Subsequent functional interpretation of the data is used to explore the effect upon the quantitative patterns identified of the phenomenon of colloquialism and of further factors with which it interacts (including Americanism, prescriptivism, and evolutionary status).

Are we visible? An interdisciplinary data-based study of self-mention in research articles

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohsen Khedri
Keyword(s):  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Environmental Engineering ◽  
Research Articles ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Subjective Strategies ◽  
First Person Plural

AbstractResearch articles have often materialized through the use of impersonal objective strategies viz. abstract rhetors, passive constructions, and nominalizations. However, intrusive or subjective strategies, such as self-mentions, appear to integrate impersonal structures. As a rhetorical strategy to explicitly portray authorial selves, self-mentions help writers to project themselves into the discourse by marketing themselves and demarcating their original contribution to the field. Here, an interdisciplinary approach was adopted to examine explicit authorial presence in a comparable corpus of 40 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering, and chemistry by taking into consideration: (i) the frequency of using exclusive first person plural pronouns (

Inclusive and exclusive uses of we in four American textbooks for multicultural teacher education

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 625-647
Author(s):  
Baburhan Uzum ◽  
Bedrettin Yazan ◽  
Ali Fuad Selvi
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Positioning Theory ◽  
Language Teachers ◽  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Multicultural Teacher Education ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
Multicultural Teacher

This study analyses four American multicultural teacher education textbooks for instances of inclusive and exclusive representations through the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. we, us, our, ours). Positioning theory is used as a theoretical framework to examine the textbook authors’ uses of first person plural pronouns and to understand how these pronouns perform reflexive and interactive positioning and fluidly (re)negotiate and (re)delineate the borders between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ The findings suggest that first person plural pronouns are used extensively in the focal textbooks to refer to such groups as authors, Americans, humans, teachers, and teacher educators. Expressing differing levels of ambiguity in interpretation, these pronouns play significant roles in the discursive representations of inclusivity and exclusivity across topics of multicultural education. This study implicates that language teachers should use criticality and reflexivity when approaching exclusionary discourses and representations that neglect the particularities of individuals from different cultures.

Did Paul Really Think He Wasn’t Going to Die?

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-59
Author(s):  
J. Andrew Doole
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
First Person Plural

AbstractIt is often claimed that Paul expected the Lord to return in glory within his lifetime, based in part on the text of 1 Thess 4:13–18. Those who have a theological interest in denying Paul’s mistaken optimism have to bend over backwards to explain why this wasn’t the case. The use of the First Person Plural in this passage however may be indicative that Paul was not actually making this claim for himself at all. Both the content and the context suggest rather that Paul, Silvanus and Timothy were providing the Thessalonian Christians with a “soundbite” for mutual and reciprocal encouragement when they met as a community. Indeed, Paul may have used First Person Plural soundbites throughout his ministry.

scholarly journals We Shall Fight: Speaker-Exclusive We as a Grammatical Metaphor

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Francesca Santulli
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
First Person ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Plural Pronoun ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The One ◽  
Metaphorical Interpretation

The first person plural pronoun cannot be considered as an expression of pluralization of the first. Its semantic boundaries are defined in context, and this inherent vagueness an be pragmatically exploited for communicative purposes. Beyond the frequently investigated opposition between (addressee-) inclusive vs exclusive forms, this paper explores non-prototypical uses of the first person plural pronoun, focusing on the conflicts that arise when it is used in contexts that semantically exclude the speaker. Speaker-exclusive forms can occur in different situations, ranging from interpersonal exchanges to public discourse. The paper investigates their different semantic implications, highlighting their common traits as well as their crucial peculiarities. Both the review of the literature and the analysis of actual examples bring forth the different values and functions of various speaker-exclusive occurrences of the first person plural. A more systematic categorization of the forms can be obtained adopting a metaphorical interpretation, which on the one hand emphasises their common denominator (i.e. speaker-exclusiveness) and, on the other, sheds light on their varying communicative potential.

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