Connecting Grammatical Person, Humanness, and Discourse Functions: Always Progressives as a Case Study

Because they reflect such important pragmatic and cognitive aspects of discourse, grammatical person and humanness merit special consideration in the analysis of any linguistic structure containing nominals. Progressive verbs tend to take human and volitional subjects, a pattern one might predict ex...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Corpus pragmatics : international journal of corpus linguistics and pragmatics Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 39 - 62
Main Author: Lindley, Jori
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.03.2022
Subjects:
Computational Linguistics
Computer Appl. in Arts and Humanities
Linguistics
Original Paper
Pragmatics
Semantics
Social Sciences
Progressive
Complaints
Grammatical person
Positive evaluations
Gossip
Agentivity
ISSN:2509-9507, 2509-9515
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Because they reflect such important pragmatic and cognitive aspects of discourse, grammatical person and humanness merit special consideration in the analysis of any linguistic structure containing nominals. Progressive verbs tend to take human and volitional subjects, a pattern one might predict extends to always progressives used as complaints, e.g., you’re always muttering . (Being agentive, humans can be held accountable for irritating actions.) This functional, corpus-based study explores the relationship between the functions of 1233 always progressives and features of their grammatical subjects. Tokens were coded by subject type (first person pronoun [1PP], addressee you  [Addr], generic you [Gen], third party [3P], or nonhuman [NH]) and function (complaint, lament, positive evaluation, or emotionally neutral description). A configural frequency analysis indicated that the combinations 3P-Complain, 3P-Positive, and Addr-Complain were more frequent than expected and the combinations 1PP-Complain, NH-Complain, Gen-Complain, 1PP-Positive, and 3P-Describe were less frequent. I propose sociological explanations for these findings, such as a reluctance to brag and the fact that gossip—the sharing of negative information about third parties—serves crucial social functions. In addition, I show that generic you is semantically and functionally similar to the 1PP, and that, given this, analyses should not conflate generic and addressee you .
ISSN:2509-9507
2509-9515
DOI:10.1007/s41701-021-00114-3