The Referential Meaning Of English Second Person Pronoun: A Cognitive Grammar Approach

Deixis is a linguistic unit which plays a significant role in daily communication. It is generally believed that the usage of deixis is relatively stable compared with other parts of speech because deixis is a closed category and their semantic variation is extremely slow. But in the actual communication, personal pronoun system is full of changes, and their referent scope is also not as clear as what is described in person pronoun system. There always exist some asymmetric situations between personal pronouns, especially the second person pronoun. The second person pronoun you is very special for its unique forms and various referential meanings in person deixis. Though the traditional studies of you’s referential meaning might have been pushed further and more comprehensive, most of them solely take these distinct referential meanings of you as its different uses. Hence some questions in traditional studies have been raised, for example, why you itself can refer to so many other personal pronouns and do these distinct referential meanings have any connections? Scholars rarely make inquiries about these questions.In this thesis, the author adopts the relevant theory of the Cognitive Grammar as the guide, and the elaborate description of the syntactic structures and the semantic features of you as the foundation, to explore the cognitive motivation of the second person pronoun’s referential meaning and to give a reasonable explanation of the correspondence between syntactic features and the semantic functions of you.Through the analysis of the second person pronoun’s referential meaning we have two major findings. One is that in the facet of the language itself, we found that when the second person pronoun is used to refer to other personal pronouns, the speaker takes these other personal pronouns, including the hearer as the speech event participant and always puts them onstage as the focus of attention. Hence, we sum up that the primary cognitive characteristic of the use of the second person pronoun you is by putting a speech event participant onstage as the designated entity to achieve the objectification of the speech event participant. The other achievements are at the theoretical level. It is found that the human’s cognitive activity is restricted by the pragmatic factors because when the second person pronoun is used unconventionally, the speaker must have some intentions or want to convey some information to gain some pragmatic effects. Hence, we arrive at the conclusion that only by integrating the pragmatic factors, can we make the full range of explanation of the cognitive analysis of the referential meaning of personal pronoun. This study provides a new train of thought of the research towards English second person pronoun.