Reflection: Person markers in the history of English

English used to have a somewhat different system of grammaticalised expressions available for deictic purposes. Regarding personal pronouns, one notable difference concerned number. While today we can use most personal pronouns to distinguish number, insofar as the referent is singular or plural (e.g. I vs. we), in Old English there were also the remnants of the “dual” forms of the first and second person pronouns. Thus, wit meant we-both, and yit meant you-both (this, of course, would also have implications for what at that time counted as plural in this grammatical system – it would have been more than two, whereas today it is more than one).

However, the area of radical change concerns the second person pronouns. Elizabethan English, for example, offered a choice between two sets of pronominal forms for the second person: the forms ye, you, your, yours and yourself (the you-forms), and the forms thou, thee, thy, thine and thyself (the thou-forms). In Old English, you generally used the first set for a plural referent and the second for a singular. But by Middle English the variant chosen could have significant social implications. These items had taken on a stronger social deictic role, rather than just personal. The usage of these sets is a matter of great controversy. Brown and Gilman (1960) predicted that high status social equals used you-forms to each other, low status social equals used thou-forms to each other, high status individuals used thou-forms to lower status, and low status individuals used you-forms to higher status. These predictions fi t the usage of Middle English reasonably well. One can see a certain similarity in the way you-forms and thou-forms were used in this period of English with the way, for example, tu and vous are used in today’s French or du and Sie in German. However, these predictions become more and more unreliable as we move towards the 17th century. The meanings of any particular usage had increasingly to be inferred from the specifics of context. Take this brief extract from the Merrie Tales of Skelton (1567) as an example. In this tale Skelton, a parson, tries to persuade a cobbler to go to war.

Generally, in this tale Skelton uses thou to the cobbler. This fits the theory, which predicts a high status participant using thou to a lower status participant. But here, despite the difference in social status, Skelton uses you to the cobbler. Why he does so is a pragmatic issue, not simply a matter of correlating usage and status. Here, Skelton is trying to be persuasive; using you lends a note of respect.

Ultimately, the thou-forms have become obsolete, except in some areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire (and some religious contexts). The fact that English second person pronouns have now been reduced to a single set of forms based on you, without any encoded meanings regarding number or social position, marks English out as distinct from many languages, especially European. By way of a postscript, it is worth noting that some dialects of English have relatively recently developed the plural form yous, Liverpool English is a case in point, and this expression has been identified as characteristic of at least some Australian and Irish speakers of English (Horvath 1985). In some dialects of American English, particularly in the South and Texan regions of the US, other second person plural forms, such as y’ll (“you all”) and yinz (“you ones”), can be found.

In Table 2.2, we have split personal deixis into two sub-categories, one pertaining to participant marking and the other pertaining to social relationship marking. The latter sub-category is often referred to as social deixis. There is absolutely no hard and fast distinction between these two sub-categories (see Marmaridou 2000: 79). The history of you-forms and thou-forms in English is a case in point. Today, English relies largely on vocatives, expressions usually used to address people, to mark social relationships, especially in the form of noun phrases (usually comprised of proper nouns and/or titles). Note, of course, the overlap here with the discussion of proper nouns. However, remember that we are focusing on deictic uses of proper nouns (compare the deictic Geoff, come here with the non-deictic Geoff came here). A summary of social deictic expressions in present-day British English with very brief indications regarding context of usage and the proportion of uses accounted for by each type (expressed as a percentage) is as follows (from Leech 1999: 109–113 and Biber et al. 1999: 1111–1113):

Endearments (e.g. (my) darling, love, sweetie). Typical address between close female family members, and “favorite” people (5%).

Family (kinship) terms (e.g. mum(my), dad(dy), ma, pa, grandma, granny, grandpa, granddad). Typical address to family members of an older generation (10%).

Familiarizers (e.g. guys, mate, folks, bro). Typical address between males signaling solidarity (15%).

First names (a) Typical address between friends and family members, as well as other (even casual) acquaintances (35%). (b) A sub-group of first names is familiarized first names, shortened first names and/or with the pet suffix -y/-ie (e.g. Marj, Tom, Jackie) (30%).

Title and surname (e.g. Mrs Johns, Mr Graham, Ms. Morrisey). Typical means of marking a more distant and respectful relationship (below 2.5%).

Honorifics (e.g. sir, madam, ma’am). Relatively rare in English, they may occur in situations such as formal service encounters, where there is a markedly asymmetrical relationship between speakers (below 2.5%).

Other See below (below 5%).

Although relatively rare, there is a wide range of “Other” forms, limited only by one’s creativity. Biber et al. (1999: 1109–1110) provide some illustrations (from the Longman Corpus of English):

As might have been observed from the above summary, social deictic expressions mark not only social relationships but also, amongst other factors, settings and in particular their degree of formality. A good example of social deixis restricted to a particular setting is the use of surnames only in more traditional schools – notably, British public schools – not just by teachers to pupils but also, to an extent, between pupils themselves.