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Article published In: The referential ambiguity of personal pronouns and its pragmatic consequences
Edited by Barbara De Cock and Bettina Kluge
[Pragmatics 26:3] 2016
► pp. 417–446

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What do(es) you mean? the pragmatics of generic second person pronouns in modern spoken Danish

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 September 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.26.3.04jen
In modern Danish, the most frequently used pronoun for generic reference is man, developed from the noun man(d) ‘man’. Recently, though, the second person singular pronoun du has gained ground, in parallel to similar recent developments in other languages. A large-scale, longitudinal study of the LANCHART corpus of spoken Danish has documented a rise in the use of generic du in Copenhagen (and later in the rest of Denmark) during the period from the early 1970s, where generic du was practically non-existent, till the late 1980s where du comprised around 25% of all pronouns with generic meaning. However, recordings from the 2000s show that the use of du has peaked and is now decreasing or stabilizing at a lower level.This article focuses on intra-individual and intra-conversational variation within the LANCHART corpus with the aim of uncovering the pragmatic effect of using du instead of other generic pronouns. All passages in the recordings have been coded according to macro speech act, activity type, type of interaction and genre as well as enunciation. The results of a statistical analysis using mixed models show a number of correlations as to the use of generic du (in comparison with man), and by and large support the claim that generic du is used as a resource for construing involvement, arguably by exploiting the ambiguity of du between a generic and a specific second person meaning. These quantitative results make up the point of departure for corroborating qualitative analyses of the discourse framing of the use of generic pronouns.
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Cited by (7)

Cited by seven other publications

De Cock, Barbara
2022. Register, genre and referential ambiguity of personal pronouns. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 361 ff. DOI logo
Kluge, Bettina
2022. Generic uses of the second person singular – how speakers deal with referential ambiguity and misunderstandings. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 501 ff. DOI logo
Rădulescu, Valentin & Daniël Van Olmen
2022. A questionnaire-based study of impersonalization in Romanian and English. Languages in Contrast 22:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Zobel, Sarah
2022. A pragmatic analysis of german impersonally used first person singular ‘ICH’. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 379 ff. DOI logo
Auer, Peter & Anja Stukenbrock
2018. When ‘You’ Means ‘I’: The German 2Nd Ps.Sg. Pronoun Du between Genericity and Subjectivity. Open Linguistics 4:1 ► pp. 280 ff. DOI logo
Haas, Florian
2018. “You can’t control a thing like that”. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo
Varjo, Mikael & Karita Suomalainen
2018. From zero to ‘you’ and back: A mixed methods study comparing the use of two open personal constructions in Finnish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 41:3 ► pp. 333 ff. DOI logo

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