Book Review: First Person Plural

Book Review: First Person Plura

First Person Plural: Short Stories

I decided to title this collection First Person Plural after observing that one of the most prominent motifs common among these stories concerns the instability and multiplicity of identity. Horror is one of the traditions that most influences my writing, particularly the claustrophobic psychological horror of writers like Edgar Allen Poe. I mainly deploy the tropes of horror in an effort to destabilize my characters’ inner and outer realities. Another important influence on my writing has been that brand of fiction which exists within the liminal space between horror and realism, such as Dan Chaon’s collection Stay Awake, Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where is Here?” That’s the realm where some of my stories exist, where the metaphors of horror collapse on themselves and reveal what they’re designed to represent and conceal. As a writer, one of my goals/challenges is to make cliches less cliche, to find new ways of telling familiar stories and invent conventions for telling unfamiliar ones. For each story in this collection, I attempted to identify and employ whichever conventions promised to best help me tell it in an unconventional and hopefully more effective way

Some Tibetan first person plural inclusive pronouns

In three previous papers I have explored the development of the person-al pronoun system in different periods of Tibetan literature (Hill 2007; 2010; 2013). I offer a further contribution in this direction to Per K vrerne with deep regard and admiration. Abel Zadoks may be the first to hav

The Rising Vulnerability of Indonesian Language Culture: Analyzing the Encoded Politeness in the Use of Plural Second-Person Pronouns

This article explored the use of Indonesian pronouns by young people in Indonesia. The way in which they use pronouns erodes Indonesian culture encoded in Indonesian pronouns. They use the pronouns kamu (you, second-person singular pronoun), kalian (you, second-person plural pronoun), kita (we (you and me), first-person plural pronoun), and kami (we (not including you), first-person plural pronoun) that do not comply with Indonesian grammar. The data was collected by observing language used among the younger generation online and in everyday speech. The data was analyzed using a book on Indonesian grammar by A. M. Moeliono et al. The results discovered that Indonesian pronouns express politeness, particularly in the use of kamu and kalian (you, second-person plural pronouns), and the differences between first-person plural pronouns kita (we (you and me), first-person plural pronoun), and kami (we (not including you), first-person plural pronoun). Keywords: Indonesian Language, Pronoun, Culture, Politenes

Singular perception, multiple perspectives through we: constructing intersubjective meaning in English and German

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based investigation of the role of the first-person plural pronoun in the construction of intersubjective meaning among evidential perception verbs in written and spoken English and German (mainly written). Whereas the first-person singular pronoun only signifies that the evidence rests solely with the speaker/writer, the first-person plural pronoun allows a much wider range of intersubjective meanings concerning the nature of the evidence. It is also shown how English and German perception verbs express intersubjective evidential meaning in a number of different complementation patterns, how the type of this meaning is often linked to these patterns, and how the use of the first-person plural pronoun can vary among and within these constructions

WHAT DID WE JUST SEE? AMBIGUITY AND REVELATION IN THE EXTREME FIRST PERSON PLURAL

Questions of point of view are pivotal in fictional texts and determine what story, precisely, the author can tell. But what happens when writers present particularly challenging points of view? With a focus on the first person plural, this paper will interrogate stories where point of view ‘asserts’ itself to the reader. Using an approach informed by unnatural narratology, this paper addresses narrative situations where the make-up of a narrative collective is initially unclear, and where a challenging or ambiguous point of view is revealed to be an integral component of the plot. In exploring the relationship between point of view, ambiguity and narrative revelation, this paper will consider a range of contemporary novels written predominately in the first person plural, notably TaraShea Nesbit’s The Wives of Los Alamos, Malcolm Knox’s The Wonder Lover and Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs. Highlighting the innate ambiguity of an ‘extreme’ first person plural allows us to consider ways in which authors of fiction in the first person plural have exploited this ambiguity to shape key revelations within their texts

Wir bleiben Kanzlerin — We are Pregnant? : On grammatical, semantic and pragmatic usages of the "we" pronoun

This paper convenes and discusses insights from different linguistic paradigms on the study of the first person plural pronouns we and wir. It questions the grammatical and semantic regularities as it addresses deviating structures and meanings. It further draws on cross-linguistic variation on the topic for a deeper understanding of grammatical and semantic peculiarities of the first person plural pronoun in English and German

A taxonomy of the first person plural

En este artículo se busca elaborar filosóficamente el concepto nosotros. Metodológicamente, se utiliza al constructivismo filosófico de Deleuze y Guattari. Se parte de una taxonomía comprensiva de la pragmática del pronombre de primera persona plural ‘nosotros’, y luego señalando juegos de oposiciones que brindan consistencia interna y externa al concepto. Se muestra que el pronombre implica múltiples usos que permiten tratarlo como una herramienta discursiva que afecta el campo de lo social.This paper is intended to construct philosophically the concept 'we' from a comprehensive taxonomy of the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’. Philosophical constructivism after Deleuze and Guattari is applied. Starting from the grammatical definition, it is possible to display an array of oppositions that provides internal and external consistency to the concept. It is shown that the pronoun involves a multiplicity of usages so as to deal with it as a sort of discourse tool that transforms the social domain.Escuela de Ciencias Humana