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In:The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns
Edited by Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin
[Studies in Language Companion Series 171] 2015
► pp. 95–104

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Chapter 5. ‘Loquor, ergo sum’

‘I’ and animateness re-considered

 | University of Nottingham
Published online: 10 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.05wal
My title echoes Lyons (1982), who was himself much indebted to the work of Benveniste (1966). I shall first critique Benveniste’s ideas about the first person pronoun and le sujet parlant. For my purposes here I want to argue for the primacy of the rhetorical situation of discourse, rather than the canonical, which figures prominently in poetry and fantasy; and so highlight <I> with non-human reference (prosopopoeia) and <you> with non-human reference (apostrophe). I shall argue that this anthropomorphic <I> is prevalent in many kinds of non-literary discourse today, centred on marketing and advertising: what I term the “Alice in Wonderland” principle, following the signs Drink me and Eat me found down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit-hole. A detailed linguistic analysis of many examples of such signs and notices will lead to a critique of notions of subjectivity and empathy, and of focalisation and “person-ality”. It will be argued in the process that there are interesting implications for cultural and media studies, anthropology, eco-criticism and cognitive poetics.
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Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Smyreck, Ralph
2019. Wenn das Produkt zum Flirt wird – multimodale Textualität am Beispiel von In-App-Werbung bei Tinder. Lebende Sprachen 64:2 ► pp. 435 ff. DOI logo
Gardelle, Laure & Sandrine Sorlin
2018. Introduction. International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2 ► pp. 133 ff. DOI logo
Wales, Katie
2018. “I Am Thy Father’s Spirit”: The First-Person Pronoun and the Rhetoric of Identity in Hamlet. In Pronouns in Literature, ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2018. Cognitive rhetoric [Linguistic Approaches to Literature, 31], DOI logo

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