The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns

This volume presents new research on the pragmatics of personal pronouns. Whereas personal pronouns used to have a reputation of poor substitutes for full NP’s, recent research shows that personal pronouns are a fundamental, if not universal, category, whose pragmatics is central to their understanding. For instance, personal pronouns may indicate attentional continuity or social deixis, and take on genre-specific pragmatic effects. The authors of the present collection investigate such effects and analyse competing forms in context (e.g. she / her in subject position), as well as their pragmatic functions in an extensive range of genres such as advertising, TV series, charity appeals, mother/child interaction or computer-mediated communication. Moreover, one section is devoted to the pragmatics of antecedentless pronouns and so-called ‘impersonal’ personal forms. The volume will be of interest to both scholars and students interested in the pragmatics of functional words.

Bettina Kluge, University of Hildesheim, in English Text Construction Vol. 12:1: pp. 154–161.:
This volume is highly commendable, as it gives a thought-provoking panoramic view of personal pronoun analysis in different approaches and languages, aiming at an increased dialog and awareness of results coming from other approaches than one’s own, and also between scholars working on different languages.