Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity (Language in Society)

In recent years the idea of a determinate relation between language and reality, both social and physical, has been revived, and in consequence the writings of Sapir and Whorf have once again come to be of interest. In this book Rom Harre and Peter Muhlhausler defend a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, with emphasis on the role of language in the creation and maintenance of social relations. Since pronouns are, they believe, the main grammatical devices by which acts of speaking are tied to the persons who are engaged in the conversation, they investigate how pronouns are employed as a means of coming to understand the ways that speech and society are related. Their book has a second simultaneous concern with the social and situational contexts of grammar. Using this approach in the study of pronouns, several assumptions, such as the hypothesis of the independence of grammar, the choice of the sentence as the unit of analysis and the "substitution" theory of pronoun use, have all come into question. The conclusions drawn in this book are based on a broad corpus of data from many and diverse cultures, coupled with a survey of the literature concerning this topic.