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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. 259–274

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Chapter 13. The infinite present

The pronoun on and the present tense in L’excès – l’usine by Leslie Kaplan

 | Norwegian School of Economics
Published online: 10 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.171.13gje
This chapter analyses the interaction of the French indefinite personal pronoun on and the present tense in L’excès – l’usine by Leslie Kaplan, a collection of poetry about the experience of factory work. ‘On’ has a complex semantic content, and its interpretative values range from the personal (corresponding to the English ‘we’) to the indefinite (‘one’), depending on contextual factors, including text and genre. The chapter argues that L’excès – l’usine instantiates the influence of textual genre; the interaction of two semantically underdetermined elements is conditioned by the textual universe to create a particular representation of subjectivity and temporality, as well as of the factory universe.
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