Pronoun avoidance

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Pronoun avoidance is the use of kinship terms, titles and other complex nominal expressions instead of personal pronouns in speech. [1]

Contents

Linguistics

Many languages feature the T–V distinction, where two or more different pronouns are used contextually to convey formality or familiarity. In contrast, languages with pronoun avoidance tend to feature complex systems of honorifics and use pronoun avoidance as a form of negative politeness, [2] instead employing expressions referring to status, relationship or title. [1] In these languages, second person pronouns still exist, but are used primarily to address social equals and inferiors. [1]

Languages with pronoun avoidance cluster in East and South-East Asia. [1] For example, in Indonesian, the standard terms of respectful forms of address are Bapak (literally "father") and Ibu ("mother") for men and women respectively, [3] and the neologism Anda was invented in the 1950s to function as a polite second-person pronoun. [4] Japanese, well known for its elaborate system of honorific speech, also exhibits pronoun avoidance, [5] to such an extent that Maynard suggests that Japanese “lacks a pronominal system”. [6]

Pronoun avoidance may extend to first and third person pronouns as well. In Vietnamese, a set of finely graded kinship terms largely replace all pronouns, but it is also common particularly for women to refer to themselves by name, and titles are often used for third parties. [7]

As well, there may be sociolects or dialects where pronoun avoidance occurs while more prevalent forms of the language lack it. Many Orthodox Jews, when addressing a rabbi, teacher, or other spiritual authority, will address him with the word "Rebbi" instead of "you." [8] [9] The practice is very old, dating at least to the Talmud, [10] and has been noted in Halachic literature. [11] [12] However, though some English-speaking Jews do this, this practice is absent in English as a whole.

Languages featuring pronoun avoidance

The World Atlas of Language Structures [13] characterizes the following languages as exhibiting pronoun avoidance:

Autism

Children with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently exhibit pronoun reversal or pronoun avoidance, using proper names instead. [14] Since autistic children often have difficulty with pronouns, this phenomenon has been attributed variously to input from adults avoiding pronouns, or abnormalities in how children with ASD experience the self. [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

The T–V distinction is the contextual use of different pronouns that exists in some languages and serves to convey formality or familiarity. Its name comes from the Latin pronouns tu and vos. The distinction takes a number of forms and indicates varying levels of politeness, familiarity, courtesy, age or even insult toward the addressee. The field that studies and describes this phenomenon is sociolinguistics.

The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia, and Classical Chinese was adopted by scholars and ruling classes in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. As a consequence, there was a massive influx of loanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages. The Chinese script was also adapted to write Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, though in the first two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning, linguistic or historical study, artistic or decorative works and newspapers, rather than daily usage.

Chinese pronouns differ somewhat from pronouns in English and other Indo-European languages. For instance, there is no differentiation in the spoken language between "he", "she" and "it", and pronouns are not inflected to indicate whether they are the subject or object of a sentence. Mandarin Chinese further lacks a distinction between the possessive adjective ("my") and possessive pronoun ("mine"); both are formed by appending the particle 的 de. Pronouns in Chinese are often substituted by honorific alternatives.

The Japanese language has a system of honorific speech, referred to as keigo, parts of speech that show respect. Their use is mandatory in many social situations. Honorifics in Japanese may be used to emphasize social distance or disparity in rank, or to emphasize social intimacy or similarity in rank. Japanese honorific titles, often simply called honorifics, consist of suffixes and prefixes when referring to others in a conversation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Controversies in autism</span> Controversies about both the cause of autism and the nature of the diagnoses themselves

Diagnoses of autism have become more frequent since the 1980s, which has led to various controversies about both the cause of autism and the nature of the diagnoses themselves. Whether autism has mainly a genetic or developmental cause, and the degree of coincidence between autism and intellectual disability, are all matters of current scientific controversy as well as inquiry. There is also more sociopolitical debate as to whether autism should be considered a disability on its own.

An honorific is a title that conveys esteem, courtesy, or respect for position or rank when used in addressing or referring to a person. Sometimes, the term "honorific" is used in a more specific sense to refer to an honorary academic title. It is also often conflated with systems of honorific speech in linguistics, which are grammatical or morphological ways of encoding the relative social status of speakers. Honorifics can be used as prefixes or suffixes depending on the appropriate occasion and presentation in accordance with style and customs.

Korean pronouns pose some difficulty to speakers of English due to their complexity. The Korean language makes extensive use of speech levels and honorifics in its grammar, and Korean pronouns also change depending on the social distinction between the speaker and the person or persons spoken to.

Japanese pronouns are words in the Japanese language used to address or refer to present people or things, where present means people or things that can be pointed at. The position of things and their role in the current interaction are features of the meaning of those words. The use of pronouns, especially when referring to oneself and speaking in the first person, vary between gender, formality, dialect and region where Japanese is spoken.

Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.

In general, a Vietnamese pronoun can serve as a noun phrase. In Vietnamese, a pronoun usually connotes a degree of family relationship or kinship. In polite speech, the aspect of kinship terminology is used when referring to oneself, the audience, or a third party. These terms may vary by region. Many are derived from Chinese loanwords but have acquired the additional grammatical function of being pronouns.

The Korean language has a system of honorifics that recognizes and reflects the hierarchical social status of participants with respect to the subject and/or the object and/or the audience. Speakers use honorifics to indicate their social relationship with the addressee and/or subject of the conversation, concerning their age, social status, gender, degree of intimacy, and speech act situation.

Pathological demand avoidance (PDA) or extreme demand avoidance (EDA) is a proposed disorder and sub-type of autism spectrum disorder, defined by characteristics such as a greater-than-typical refusal to comply with requests or expectations and extreme efforts to avoid the social demand. Any expectation, even familiar, routine activities for highly desired activities, such as getting ready to leave home to visit a playground, can trigger avoidant behavior, and if the demand cannot be avoided, a panic attack or a meltdown may ensue.

Vietnamese is an analytic language, meaning it conveys grammatical information primarily through combinations of words as opposed to suffixes. The basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO), but utterances may be restructured so as to be topic-prominent. Vietnamese also has verb serialization. In Vietnamese the head of the phrase usually precedes its complements, nouns are classified according to series of lexical parameters, and pronouns may be absent from utterances. Question words in the language occur in the end of the utterance (wh-in-situ),

In linguistics, an honorific is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation.

Honorifics are a class of words or grammatical morphemes that encode a wide variety of social relationships between interlocutors or between interlocutors and referents. Honorific phenomena in Thai include honorific registers, honorific pronominals, and honorific particles.

Malay grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Malay language and Indonesian. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses and sentences. In Malay and Indonesian, there are four basic parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and grammatical function words (particles). Nouns and verbs may be basic roots, but frequently they are derived from other words by means of prefixes and suffixes.

Kéo or Nagé-Kéo is a Malayo-Polynesian dialect cluster spoken by the Kéo and Nage people that reside in an area southeast of the Ebu Lobo volcano in the south-central part of Nusa Tenggara Timur Province on the island of Flores, eastern Indonesia.

Burmese pronouns are words in the Burmese language used to address or refer to people or things.

The T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between various forms of addressing one's conversation partner or partners. This may be specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, age or insult toward the addressee. The distinction occurs in a number of the world's languages.

Social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SPCD), also known as pragmatic language impairment (PLI), is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in the social use of verbal and nonverbal communication. Individuals with SPCD struggle to effectively engage in social interactions, interpret social cues, and use language appropriately in social contexts. This disorder can have a profound impact on an individual's ability to establish and maintain relationships, navigate social situations, and participate in academic and professional settings. Although SPCD shares similarities with other communication disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), it is recognized as a distinct diagnostic category with its own set of diagnostic criteria and features.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Johannes Helmbrecht. 2013. Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/45, Accessed on 2021-08-03.)
  2. Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. 1987. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Morin, Izak. ["TRANSLATING PRONOUNS, PROPER NAMES AND KINSHIP TERMS FROM INDONESIAN INTO ENGLISH AND VICE VERSA." http://journal.teflin.org/index.php/journal/article/view/73/69] TEFLIN Journal [Online], 16.2 (2005): 181–194. Web. 11 Aug. 2021
  4. "What's the Difference between 'Anda' and 'Kamu' in Indonesian?". 24 May 2018.
  5. Maynard, Senko K: "An Introduction to Japanese Grammar and Communication Strategies", page 45. The Japan Times, 4th edition, 1993. ISBN   4-7890-0542-9
  6. Maynard, Senko K. Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context, page 105. University of Hawai'i Press, 1997. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wqqv1. Accessed 3 Aug. 2021.
  7. Pham, Hoa. "Gender in addressing and self-reference in Vietnamese." Gender across languages: the linguistic representation of women and men 2 (2001): 281–312.
  8. "Okay to address a rabbi with "you"?".
  9. "Speaking to a Rabbi in the Third Person".
  10. Brachos 27b et al.
  11. "[Yoreh deʻah]". Moses Maimonides, Unparalleled Editions Online. Retrieved 2023-11-27.
  12. Chida, Yoreh Deah 242:6
  13. "WALS Online - Feature 45A: Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns".
  14. Jordan, R.R. (1989), An experimental comparison of the understanding and use of speaker-addressee personal pronouns in autistic children. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 24: 169–179. https://doi.org/10.3109/13682828909011954
  15. https://www.bu.edu/autism/files/2010/03/Shield___Meier_BUCLD_38_Proceedings.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]