"I" vs. "we" or 0

[Jim Wilce]

More on pronouns...  Gumperz and Roberts did a study of South Asian
immigrants' troubles talk in institutional encounters with native Brits in
the UK.  They focused on South Asians' tendency to use stative
constructions without pronouns and how that clashed with expectations of
pronoun use by native Brits.

Gumperz, John, and Celia Roberts. 1991. Understanding in intercultural
encounters. In The pragmatics of international and intercultural
communication, edited by Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren, pp. 51-90.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Sandro Duranti has also studied the contrast between ergative constructions
that highlight agents and genitive constructions that downplay agency in
Samoan discourse.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1994. From Grammar to Politics:  Linguistic
Anthropology in a Western Samoa Village. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University
of California Press.

Duranti, Alessandro. 1990. "Politics and grammar:  The constitution of
agency in Samoan political discourse." American Ethnologist 17:646-66.

Duranti, Alessandro, and Elinor Ochs. 1990. "Genitive constructions and
agency in Samoan discourse." Studies in Language. 14:1-23.

Jim Wilce
      Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Asian Studies
        Northern Arizona University
        Box 15200
        Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh, ISBN 0-19-510687-3)
http://www.nau.edu/asian