34.154, Review: Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics: Sorlin (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-154. Wed Jan 18 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.154, Review: Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics: Sorlin (2022)

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Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:54:05
From: Susan Burt [smburt at ilstu.edu]
Subject: The Stylistics of ‘You'

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-1619.html

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.





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