“You can’t control a thing like that”
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Florian Haas
Abstract
While there is ample evidence showing that the impersonal use of second-person singular pronouns has increased in several languages, the recent history of impersonal you in English has not yet received much attention in the literature. The present investigation presents corpus evidence from Modern English indicating that this strategy has indeed gained in frequency, independently of changes in the general frequency of second-person pronouns and the evolution of genres. Tracing specific functions of impersonal you diachronically reveals that you simulating the hearer’s membership in the set generalized over and encoding hidden self-reference are relatively new uses, supporting the view that this impersonal strategy has undergone semantic extensions comparable to developments found in other languages.
Abstract
While there is ample evidence showing that the impersonal use of second-person singular pronouns has increased in several languages, the recent history of impersonal you in English has not yet received much attention in the literature. The present investigation presents corpus evidence from Modern English indicating that this strategy has indeed gained in frequency, independently of changes in the general frequency of second-person pronouns and the evolution of genres. Tracing specific functions of impersonal you diachronically reveals that you simulating the hearer’s membership in the set generalized over and encoding hidden self-reference are relatively new uses, supporting the view that this impersonal strategy has undergone semantic extensions comparable to developments found in other languages.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgments vii
- Using diachronic corpora to understand the connection between genre and language change 1
-
Part I. Methods in diachronic corpus linguistics
- ‘From above’, ‘from below’, and regionally balanced 19
- Diachronic collocations, genre, and DiaCollo 41
- Classical and modern Arabic corpora 65
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Part II. Genre and diachronic corpora
- Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800 95
- Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change 117
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Part III. Genre-based analyses of linguistic phenomena
- The importance of genre in the Greek diglossia of the 20th century 149
- “You can’t control a thing like that” 171
- Concessive conjunctions in written American English 195
- Variation of sentence length across time and genre 219
- A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change 241
- Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation 261
- The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus 281
- Genre influence on word formation (change) 301
- Index 333
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgments vii
- Using diachronic corpora to understand the connection between genre and language change 1
-
Part I. Methods in diachronic corpus linguistics
- ‘From above’, ‘from below’, and regionally balanced 19
- Diachronic collocations, genre, and DiaCollo 41
- Classical and modern Arabic corpora 65
-
Part II. Genre and diachronic corpora
- Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800 95
- Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change 117
-
Part III. Genre-based analyses of linguistic phenomena
- The importance of genre in the Greek diglossia of the 20th century 149
- “You can’t control a thing like that” 171
- Concessive conjunctions in written American English 195
- Variation of sentence length across time and genre 219
- A comparison of multi-genre and single-genre corpora in the context of contact-induced change 241
- Some methodological issues in the corpus-based study of morphosyntactic variation 261
- The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus 281
- Genre influence on word formation (change) 301
- Index 333
