First- and Second- Person Singular and Plural

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Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa

USP, FAPESP

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Thoughts expressed through the use of the singular first-person pronoun single out by a number of features often contrasted with those of the thoughts expressed through the use of other personal pronouns, among which the singular second-person pronoun “you”. The former, in contrast to the latter, are often said to be self-locating, action-related, and immune to error through misidentification (Lewis 1979, Perry 1979, Evans 1982; pace Cappelen & Dever 2013). In this round table, we take up the discussion and ask whether the contrast carries over to instances of thoughts expressed by the plural first- and second-person pronouns “we” and “you, guys” (in English). Some thoughts expressed by the first-person plural seem to be immune to error through misidentification (Smith 2018). Whether they also are self-locating and action-related the way thoughts expressed by the first-person singular are is an open question to be answered here. Another issue tackled here is whether thoughts expressed by the second-person pronoun always contrast with those expressed the first-person pronoun. An interesting fact about a significant number of (natural) languages is that they allow for a distinction between inclusive and exclusive forms of the first-person plural. Tok Pisin, for instance, a pidgin spoken in Papua New Guinea, allows for a distinction at the morphological level between yumi(inclusive we) and mipela (exclusive we). In French, the plural pronoun “nous autres” is often, yet not always used contrastively (Hilgert 2012). A way of conceptualizing the distinction is to define the inclusive we as a (singular or plural) first-and-second person combination and the exclusive we as a (singular or plural) first-and-third person combination from which the addressee (i.e. the referent of “you”) is excluded (Chen 2006, Hilgert 2012: 1782). This suggests that, in contrast to thoughts expressed by constructions involving the exclusive form, those expressed by constructions involving the inclusive form of the first-person plural pronoun may well have second-person thoughts as components.

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