The Stylistics of ‘You'
Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:8th Aug '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£104.00(9781108833028)
Including examples from diverse sources, this book explores the pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' across time, genre and medium.
Including examples from a broad range of sources, this book explores the pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' across time, genre and medium, to provide an encompassing theoretical framework for the second-person pronoun. With its unique inter-disciplinary perspective, it will interest students and scholars of both linguistics and literature.This book takes 'you', the reader, on board an interdisciplinary journey across genre, time and medium with the second-person pronoun. It offers a model of the various pragmatic functions and effects of 'you' according to different variables and linguistic parameters, cutting across a wide range of genres (ads, political slogans, tweets, news presentation, literary genres etc.), and bringing together print and digital texts under the same theoretical banner. Drawing on recent research into intersubjectivity in neuropsychology and socio-cognition, it delves into the relational and ethical processing at work in the reading of a second-person pronoun narrative. When 'you' takes on its more traditional deictic function of address, the author-reader channel can be opened in different ways, which is explored in examples taken from Fielding, Brontë, Orwell, Kincaid, Grimsley, Royle, Adichie, Bartlett, Auster, and even Spacey's 'creepy' 2018 YouTube video, ultimately foregrounding continuities and contrasts in the positioning of the audience.
'Because it is surprising how the second person may be wrapped up in many guises, and because Sorlin has presented concepts a writer may find helpful in thinking about their relationship with their audience, it is a book that may well be worth diving into.' Linda M. Davis, Technical Communication
'The Stylistics of 'You' is an excellently researched and well-argued volume that should appeal to scholars of address and reference, pragmatics, pronouns, narratology, and the ethics of authorship.' Susan Meredith Burt, LINGUIST List (https://linguistlist.org)
'Sorlin's rigorous mapping of uses of you in a wide-ranging corpus not only demonstrates the utility of her proposed model and its relevance for existing narratological frameworks and theories, but also for future interventions in diverse fields from autotheory, econarratology, trauma narratives to the recent turn against empathy in narrative studies.' Denise Wong, Diegesis
ISBN: 9781108964043
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
Weight: 439g
268 pages