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Power and Solidarity Revisited: the Acquisition and Use of Personal Pronouns in Modern English and Dutch

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Power and Solidarity Revisited: the Acquisition and Use of Personal Pronouns in Modern English and Dutch POWER AND SOLIDARITY REVISITED: THE ACQUISITION AND USE OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN MODERN ENGLISH AND DUTCH by SUSAN ANNE BLACKWELL A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English, School of Humanities The University of Birmingham January 2007 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Permission is hereby given for the copying and use of the corpora on the enclosed CDROM, on the condition that these data are to be used for non- commercial, bona-fide academic research only, and that the researcher must acknowledge this thesis in his/her references, stating it as the source of the corpus data. ABSTRACT This dissertation applies corpus linguistics techniques to reveal patterns in the acquisition and use of personal pronouns. Setting out from Brown and Gilman's mould-breaking study of "the pronouns of power and solidarity", it argues that their focus on the metaphorical use of plurality in the second-person cannot account for the numerous ways in which canonical pronoun usage is routinely violated by both children and adults. Nonetheless, the concepts of power and solidarity remain productive ones and can help to account for the patterns revealed here. The first part of the thesis uses data from the CHILDES database to argue that 1st / 2nd person 'reversals' are a common feature of language acquisition which is not unique to children on the autistic spectrum. It also examines pronoun substitutions in the 'caregiver speech' of the mothers and finds a number of differences between the groups studied. The second part uses original purpose-built corpora of English and Dutch party election broadcasts to explore how power and solidarity are constantly re-negotiated in political discourse. The patterns of pronoun use are discussed in their social context, and it is found that amateur as well as professional politicians are adept at exploiting the pragmatic versatility of pronouns. DEDICATION For my parents, Betty and Eric Blackwell ... en ook voor Willem, met wie het soms moeilijk wordt te onderscheiden tussen 'ik' en 'wij'. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first debt is of course to my supervisor Prof. Malcolm Coulthard, for his advice and comments on various drafts of this thesis. Any inadequacies in the final result are largely due to my not consulting him as often as I should have done. He was succeeded in the final stages of this project by Prof. Susan Hunston, who gave me valuable advice on presentational aspects. I am indebted to the CHILDES team at Carnegie-Mellon University, in particular to Brian MacWhinney for general advice on using the database and to Leonid Spektor for enabling me to install and run the CLAN software suite on the University of Birmingham's Sun7 and Sun19 Unix machines. Roy Pearce, Chris Bayliss and Alan Reid of Information Services also gave me frequent assistance with my no doubt irritating pleas for technical support: I thank them for their time and patience. Thanks are due to Lou Burnard of the Oxford Computing Service for his help with the Oxford Concordance Program (no doubt he was astonished to learn that anyone was still using it!); to Dr. Sandy McRae and Dr. Allan White for their invaluable advice on statistical techniques and tests for corpus data; and to Dr. Cor Koster for his wizardry with Excel spreadsheets. I am grateful to Charles Owen for providing me with tapes and transcripts of his daughter Evelyn which are mentioned in chapter 4, and for his consistent moral support. I would like to thank the following colleagues for covering my teaching during various periods of paid and unpaid Study Leave, without which I would not have been able to complete this thesis: Meriel Bloor, Ross Graham, Murray Knowles, Rosamund Moon, Charles Owen, Frances Rock. I would also like to thank all colleagues at the English Language Research and Forensic Linguistics seminars, and post-graduate students who attended seminars and BELP conferences, for providing me with the opportunity to bounce some of my ideas off them and receive invaluable feedback and necessary criticism. In particular the wit and wisdom of Annemarie Smith and Jess Shapero helped to preserve my sanity. Tony Davies was the Head of Department during the period when most of the research was conducted, and to him I owe a debt of gratitude for enabling me to take successive periods of Study Leave, and more importantly for his encouragement and moral support. I would also like to thank his successors Marcus Walsh, Maureen Bell and Susan Hunston, and Heads of School Ken Dowden and Alex Hughes, for their part in making Study Leave possible for me. The other colleagues, friends and comrades who have provided me with a support network over the last decade are too numerous to mention, but they know who they are and I trust they will all consider themselves included here. At one of the most difficult periods of my life I received counselling from the Uffculme Clinic. I would like to thank Denni Rowan for her professional yet warm encouragement, and for ensuring that I emerged from that period as a 'stress survivor' rather than a victim. I now turn to my long-suffering family. My parents must have doubted at times that this thesis would ever see the light of day. That it has done so is in no small part due to their unswerving moral (and, dare I mention, financial) support. My greatest emotional debt is to my partner Dr. Willem Meijs, who never stopped believing in my ability to complete this research even at times when everyone else had done so (including myself). He has been a constant source of advice, ideas, references and feedback. He also corrected my translation and interpretation of Dutch data and academic literature on numerous occasions. Last but not least I thank my daugher Jaswinder for her forbearance during numerous occasions when I deprived her of 'quality time' because of the demands of my research. This thesis is almost as old as she is, and she has never known me in 'Ph.D-free' mode. She often asked me when my 'Theseus' would be finished. It has indeed been a task of Daedalic complexity and labyrinthine dimensions; but the beast is slain now, and life can return to a semblance of normality; I must remember to hoist my white sails before I cast anchor and set sail for the distant shores of my next research project. CONTENTS page: CHAPTER 1: PROBLEMATISING PRONOUNS 1 1.1 Introduction: the Pronouns of Power and Solidarity 1 1.1.1 Limitations of B&G (I): informants 1 1.1.2 Limitations of B&G (II): uneven historical change 2 1.1.3 Limitations of B&G (III): 3rd person phenomena 4 1.1.4 Limitations of B&G (IV): 1st person phenomena 5 1.1.5 Limitations of B&G (V): Person choice in pronoun use 9 1.1.6 Summary 11 1.2 Linguistic Approaches to Pronouns 12 1.2.1 Transformational Generative Grammar 12 1.2.2 Speech Act Theory 13 1.2.3 Text Analysis 15 1.2.4 Corpus-based approaches 16 1.3 The Aims of This Study 17 Endnotes 20 Section A: Acquisition of Personal Pronouns CHAPTER 2: THE AUTISTIC SPECTRUM 21 2.1 Introduction: Origins of the study of autism 21 2.1.1 Kanner's 'Early Infantile Autism' 21 2.1.2 Asperger's Syndrome 24 2.1.3 'Theory of Mind' 25 2.1.4 Other Theories 27 2.2 Detecting and Diagnosing Autism 28 2.2.1 Confounding factors: mental handicap 28 2.2.2 Wing's Triad 28 2.2.3 Pretend Play 29 2.2.4 Emotional Impairment 30 2.2.5 Lack of Central Coherence 31 2.3 Possible Causes of Autism 31 2.3.1 'Psychogenic' factors 31 2.3.2 Genetic factors 33 2.3.3 Opiates 34 2.3.4 Vaccines 34 2.3.5 Hearing disorders 35 2.3.6 Epilepsy 36 2.3.7 Other possible factors 36 2.3.8 Autism and Handedness 38 2.4 Autism and Schizophrenia 39 2.5 Summary 42 Endnotes 44 CHAPTER 3: PRONOUN USAGE WITHIN THE AUTISTIC SPECTRUM 46 3.1 Pronoun usage by individuals with Early Infantile Autism 46 3.1.1 Kanner's description of autistic pronoun usage 47 3.1.2 Early Dutch accounts: Van Krevelen, Prick 49 3.1.3 More recent accounts 50 3.1.4 Jordan 50 3.1.4.1 Experiment 1: 1st and 2nd person pronouns 50 3.1.4.2 Experiment 2: 3rd person pronouns 53 3.1.4.3 Observational findings 55 3.1.4.4 Other findings 55 3.1.5 Summary 56 3.2 Pronoun usage by individuals with Aspergers' Syndrome 56 3.3 Why do autistic children produce pronoun 'reversals'? 59 3.3.1 No concept of self / Rejection of self 59 3.3.2 Part of echolalia 61 3.3.3 General tendency to reverse words 63 3.3.4 General tendency to assign fixed meanings to words 63 3.3.5 Difficulties with turn-taking and speaker roles 65 3.3.6 Summary 67 3.4 At what age or stage of development do the 'reversals' cease? 67 3.5 Is Pronoun 'Reversal' found in Other Disorders? 71 3.5.1 Schizophrenia 72 3.5.2 Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder 74 3.5.3 Down Syndrome 74 3.5.4 Visual Impairment 77 3.6 Summary 77 Endnotes 78 CHAPTER 4: NORMALLY-DEVELOPING CHILDREN'S ACQUISITION OF PRONOUNS 79 4.1 Introduction 79 4.1.1 Pronoun acquisition in normally-developing children 79 4.1.1.1 Age and MLU 80 4.1.1.2 Order of Acquisition: English 80 4.1.1.3 Order of Acquisition:
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