LINGUIST List 34.154
Wed Jan 18 2023
Review: Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics: Sorlin (2022)
Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillenlinguistlist.org>
Date: 17-Nov-2022
From: Susan Burt <smburt
ilstu.edu>
Subject: The Stylistics of ‘You'
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AUTHOR: Sandrine Sorlin
TITLE: The Stylistics of ‘You'
SUBTITLE: Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022
REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University
SUMMARY
This volume, straddling the boundary between pragmatics and narratology, focuses on characterizing the range of pragmatic effects authors may deploy and readers may experience in the variety of usages of the English pronoun ‘you’ in various text types, mostly narrative. The book contains ten chapters, nine of them organized into four sections of the volume, with the first chapter standing alone.
Sorlin opens the first chapter with several observations of non-canonical, non-conversational usage of personal pronouns, the pseudo-intimate ‘you’ of advertisements, the attempted inclusivity of ‘we’ in political slogans, cases of positioning the addressee or speaker/writer in unexpected ways. Personal pronouns are polysemous, and written narratives in particular may feature a polysemous ‘you;’ Sorlin’s goal is to understand how authors deploy potentially polysemous ‘you’ to achieve various narrative goals. To this end, she elaborates the Kluge (2016) continuum of reference interpretation for second person singular pronouns in conversation. Kluge employs frameworks of relational work (Locher and Watts 2005) and of conversational analysis (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) to probe how hearers resolve the potential ambiguity of ‘you’ in conversation: on a continuum from address to genericness, where does a particular usage fall? The task Sorlin sets for herself is to extend this continuum to work for narrative text as well.
Kluge’s (2016) continuum contains five types of ‘you’ usage:
You1: the Speaker (writer) uses a second person pronoun to present their own experience as potentially generalizable: “Sometimes you have to be really high up to understand how small you are” (a sky-diver, quoted in Kluge 2016:506).
You2: the Speaker (writer) presents self as a typical representative of a group: “You know you’ve been a faculty member for too long when….” (SMB’s created example).
You3: the experience is widely generalizable: “You don’t miss the water ‘til the well runs dry.” (proverb).
You4: the Hearer can be representative of a larger category: “vous allez cuire aussi sans matière grasse / you will also cook without fat” (in a cooking demonstration, quoted in Kluge 2016:505).
You5: the Speaker addresses an actual interlocutor: “Hey, Andrew, can you reach that blue bowl on the top shelf?” (SMB’s created example).
To these five types of ‘you’ usage, Sorlin adds You6, which “refers to an objectified protagonist who is not necessarily or clearly an addressee” (Sorlin 2022: 16). As each of these types of ‘you’ can have different perlocutionary effects on the reader of the narrative, authors must be construed as making not only cognitive, but also ethical decisions in how they “construct” or recruit or make demands of their readers. Thus, Sorlin concludes this challenging and important chapter by stating the goal of the rest of the volume: “The author-reader relationship will be studied as a pragmatic choice of the author” (p. 30).
Part I of the volume, “Singularising and Sharing: The Dialectics of ‘You’,” contains Chapters 2 and 3. Sorlin devotes all of Chapter 2 to George Orwell’s (1933) Down and Out in Paris and London, an account both journalistic and autobiographical of his experiences with poverty and homelessness, in which, Sorlin notes, he employs ‘you,’ Types 1 through 4, to achieve both distancing and immersing effects. The use of ‘you’ (as opposed to other possibilities Sorlin discusses, ‘we’ and ‘one’) gives Orwell the narrator the authority of tramp group membership and at the same time heightens reader involvement, ultimately serving Orwell’s goal of increasing middle-class readers’ understanding of and empathy for the realities of the lives of the poor.
Chapter 3 also deals with autobiographical narrative, Paul Auster’s Winter Journal and Report from the Interior. In these writings, ‘you’ may simultaneously be understood to address the reader and to reference the writer, as in “You think it will never happen to you,…” (cited, p. 58). Use of the second person, and occasionally the third, allows Auster to distance his “narrating self…from the experiencing self” (p. 59), as he, for example, asks his earlier self, “Who were you, little man?” (60). Like Orwell, Auster uses ‘you’ to increase reader involvement, even immersion, but also distance and even alienation. Sorlin finds that the pragmatic effects of ‘you’ can be oxymoronic: “intimate distance and singular commonality” (74).
Part II of the volume, “The Role of ‘You’ in the Writing of Traumatic Events,” contains Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4, ‘Performing ‘Self-Othering’ in Winter Birds by Jim Grimsley, focuses on Grimsley’s use of ‘you’ with the purpose of evoking empathy in a reading audience who may not have experienced trauma as Grimsley’s protagonist “Danny” did. Here, uses of ‘you’ can be read simultaneously as Type 1 and Type 5; at the same time (and as in Auster), use of second person address referencing the protagonist can serve to put distance between the author and his earlier self. While ‘you’ might not evoke common experiences on the part of the reader, the reader is nevertheless invited to bear witness to the protagonist’s trauma and vulnerability.
Chapter 5, “Pronominal ‘Veering’ in Quilt by Nicholas Royle” discusses an experimental novel that Sorlin, at chapter’s end, characterizes as “unclassifiable…in narratological terms” (124). The novel is a study in grief: “what does a man do the day his father dies?” (quoted by Sorlin, p. 108). Royle refers to/addresses his protagonist in first, second and third person; thus the narrator also shifts as the protagonist’s partner narrates part of the novel; as the protagonist becomes more distant, Sorlin suggests that here is where her notion of a You6 is needed. Finally, the partner uses third person to refer to the protagonist. The lack of a single perspective, the “veering” away, as Sorlin puts it, from more traditional points of view, gives this novel what Sorlin calls “narratological instability” (p. 121).
Part III of the volume, containing Chapters 6, 7, and 8, is entitled “The Author-Reader Channel across Time, Gender, Sex and Race. Chapter 6, “Two Ways of Conversing with the Reader,” discusses Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In Joseph Andrews, Fielding’s narrator, who is neither the title character nor Fielding himself, addresses, directs, guides, coaxes, and instructs the reader, with phrases like “The Reader may please to recollect…” (cited, p. 131). The narrator mitigates the intrusions made on the reader’s negative face, and explicitly opts out of Quantity Maxim violations: “ It would be impertinent to insert a Discourse which chiefly turned on the relation of Matters already well known to the Reader” (cited, p. 134). Fielding’s narrator addresses the reader with the vocative, ‘Reader,’ also as ‘you’ or ‘thou,’ but is not overbearing; Sorlin sees his use of ‘you’ as a You4, and characterizes this usage as “distancing of the most liberating kind” (p. 141).
In contrast, in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, the protagonist-narrator is engaging rather than distancing; Sorlin counts 30 instances of the vocative use of ‘Reader,’ including the well-known “Reader, I married him,” and only 6 instances of the third-person reference “the reader.” Bronte uses devices such as the historical present and has Jane-the-narrator use You2 to refer to herself, making herself representative of all women, to enlist readers to share in the character’s viewpoint, emotions, and wish for a happy ending.
Chapter 7, entitled “Empathy for Sexual Minorities in Skin Lane” discusses Neil Bartlett’s (2007) “talk fiction” (p. 154) narrative about Mr. F, a gay man in 1967 London. Bartlett uses deixis shared by narrator and reader, as in “our protagonist” (cited, p. 155), imperatives addressed to the reader (“remember,” “imagine”), and the occasional narrator first-person, “I wonder” (cited, p. 158) to foreground the author-reader channel and bring immediacy to the narration. Bartlett deploys several varieties of ‘you;’ Sorlin identifies You1, You2, You3, and You5 and concludes: Bartlett “never separate[s] the character’s experience from a more generic, inclusive one” (p. 166). The result is that narrator, character, and reader are all connected (p. 167).
Chapter 8, “The Ethics and Politics of the Second Person in ‘Postcolonial’ Writing,” first discusses Jamaica Kincaid’s essay A Small Place. In this critique of British colonialism and tourism, Kincaid “performs an unmitigated Face Threatening Act” at the reader (“you”) whom she has positioned as tourist: “A tourist is an ugly human being” (cited, p. 176). Although Kincaid positions the “authorial audience” as belonging to a different population than the author herself, Sorlin finds that “the reader cannot help but be forcefully engaged” (p. 181).
The second section of Chapter 8 discusses Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2009) short story “The Thing around Your Neck,” in which the protagonist, a Nigerian woman, lives and works in the U.S. Most instances of ‘you’ in this story refer to the protagonist, Akunna. Adichie’s use of ‘you’ seems to fall between You1 and You5, and might qualify as a You6; Sorlin writes that “ ‘you’ both does and does not address the protagonist” (p. 185). Nonetheless, the reader, including a non-African reader, may feel addressed by ‘you’, and pulled into an “alignment” (p. 189) with Akunna, thus at the same time enhancing their identification with her and expanding their view of American culture to encompass her view.
Part IV of the volume, “New Ways of Implicating Through the Digital Medium,” contains Chapters 9 and 10. In Chapter 9, Sorlin links the growth of non-print media with an upsurge in “you narratives;” Twitter storytelling, for example, imitates oral storytelling, she claims. As online games and hypertext fiction increase, the boundaries between readers and writers begin to disappear, and “the reader takes part in the creation of the story” (p. 204). In narratives like P. Burne’s Twenty-four Hours with Someone You Know, the reader needs to take action, choosing and pressing a link, to move the story forward, and ‘you’ may function as You4, You5, and You6, all in the same text. Readers may be distanced from or more engaged with the text; the same is true of narrators. Readers may accept or reject the positions an author offers to them, or occupy more than one position at once.
Chapter 10 discusses a 2018 YouTube Video created by actor Kevin Spacey while he was under sexual assault charges. Spacey faces the audience in the guise of “Frank Underwood,” a role he played in “House of Cards,” addresses the audience as “you,” and appeals to the audience’s assumed approval for his acting. As Sorlin sees it, Spacey “uses the plasticity of the second-person pronoun” (p. 223) to claim an in-group of his audience, and to appeal to House of Cards viewers’ trust and fandom in order to cast doubt on his accusers. “I know what you want, you want me back,” Spacey utters, using the confident tone of his Frank Underwood character, and thereby “abusively includ[ing] the audience in his feelings” (p. 225). Spacey conflates his fictional and real worlds, and thus, the video works as “neither fictional nor factual” (p. 228). Importantly, Spacey’s use of ‘you’ positions audience members as both fans and citizens, and threatens to turn them into accomplices.
Sorlin concludes that her theory of ‘you’ works across genres, that ‘you’ is oxymoronic in its distancing/engaging effects, and that the pragmatic capabilities of ‘you’ bring new ethical questions to pronoun choice.
EVALUATION
Sorlin’s argument is enhanced by the impressive breadth of data types she displays, fiction and non-fiction texts, texts across centuries and literary eras, texts across printed, digital, and video platforms; speakers and writers of Modern English share linguistic resources across these eras and platforms, but deploy them differently to create varieties of effects which Sorlin examines in sensitive depth and detail. In turn, these effects, such as the distancing or engaging of the reader, serve what Sorlin sees as the authors’ goals of enhancing audiences’ empathy, identities, or experiences with other views of the world than their own.
Sorlin’s argument relies crucially on Kluge’s continuum of ‘you’ interpretation. If this volume has a weakness, it may be that the explanation of You6 was not made clear with enough examples. Mind you, of the texts Sorlin analyzed, I have read only one (and which that may be is left as a guessing exercise for the Reader), not that Sorlin can possibly be held responsible for my deficient background as a reader. And her larger point survives any particular reader’s background deficiency: ‘you’ as a polysemous personal pronoun can give rise to new pragmatic effects, as authors deploy it across expanding genres and platforms.
In sum, 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.
REFERENCES
Kluge, Bettina. 2016. Generic Uses of the Second Person Singular: How Speakers Deal with Referential Ambiguity and Misunderstandings. Pragmatics 26,3: 501-522.
Locher, Miriam, and Richard Watts. 2005. Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1,1: 9-33.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50,4: 696-735.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, wrote her 1986 UIUC dissertation on deictic verbs and indirect quotation in Japanese, but of late, has turned her attention to issues of address and reference. She is a member of INAR, the International Network for Address Research; her favorite part of speech is the personal pronoun.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Susan Meredith Burt, Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, wrote her 1986 UIUC dissertation on deictic verbs and indirect quotation in Japanese, but of late, has turned her attention to issues of address and reference. She is a member of INAR, the International Network for Address Research; her favorite part of speech is the personal pronoun.
Page Updated: 18-Jan-2023