Study On The Phenomenon That “you” Refer To Non-listeners In Modern Spoken Chinese

In actual verbal communication, "you" is more and more frequently used to refer to non-listeners. Through analyzing real context, this paper describes this phenomenon in details and discusses the reasons for this phenomenon.This paper mainly makes the analysis from the following three aspects:The phenomenon of "you" refering to non-listeners is divided into six classifications based on the recordings from interviews in natural situations and different objects that "you" refers to, i.e.,(1) "you" referring to the speaker himself/herself instead of using "me",(2) "you" used as a general reference,(3) "you" referring to the objects in context,(4) "you" refering to someone else,(5) "you" used as discourse markers and(6) "you" used as identity, respectively.This paper argues that "you" has achieved grammaticalization. The specific manifestation of grammaticalization are: "you" being syntactically positioned in front, "you" referring to different objects, "you" referring to the ambiguity of the object and "you" acting as a topic marker. It is believed that the grammaticalization of "you" follows a certain path: semantically, from "listeners" to "non-listeners" to "no reference object"; grammatically, from "with clear grammar composition and function" to "fuzzy grammatical components" to "keep only grammatical functions".The phenomenon that "you" refers to "non-listeners" and the mechanism of grammaticalization are still not clear, this paper analyses the reason from child pronoun acquisition, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.