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Subject:
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Referring to self in second person
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Question:
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It seems that there's been a trend in increased use of second person when people are referring to themselves in speech.
Example:
Q: ''How did you feel when you lost your job?''
A: ''You're in shock. You get angry, you feel lost. You wonder what you could've done differently, but you have to move on.''
Has there been any linguistic research done on this aspect of language use? I'm trying to remember when I first noticed it. Thank you very much for any information you can provide.
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Reply:
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Sorry, I cannot suggest any research, but it strikes me that what's really happening here is that the speaker is diverting the discussion away from himself in particular by using the generic second person, as in "your average garden variety eggplant". The sense here is that all people would feel this way under such like circumstances.
I think this is like the generic use of 'you' in the second person narrative in a story designed to put the reader in the scene and action, as in "...and you look out the starboard gun port and see a jagged tear in the wing...". Here the effect of using the generic is the opposite of the case you cite-- a reader distant from the scene is brought into immediacy. But in both cases it's a generic 'you' that diverts the narrative from the narrator. I.e., it's a way of making it clear that one is not referring to just ones' self. It says" you're like me and under like circumstances will observe, behave, feel..... this way."
You might want to look in some works on narrative style and person of narrator.
U of Cincinnati
Dept of Anthropology
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Reply From:
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Joseph F Foster
click here to access email
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| Date: |
May-08-2009
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Other Replies:
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Re: Referring to self in second person
Charley Rowe
(May-08-2009)
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Re: Referring to self in second person
James L Fidelholtz
(May-08-2009)
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Re: Referring to self in second person
Elizabeth J Pyatt
(May-11-2009)
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Re: Referring to self in second person
Herbert Frederic Stahlke
(May-08-2009)
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