Second Person Plural Forms in World Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study

Second person pronouns are one of the linguistic means that have the greatest impact on the definition of our relationship with the "other". They retain significant political power and influence, establish how close two or more individuals are in a social group, define who is in the group or out of the group. Yet, not many are aware of the variability of second person pronominal forms and their functions in English. This is probably due to the fact that many socially and pragmatically connotated pronouns belong to informal, spoken language, therefore they cannot be found in reference dictionaries and grammars of English. In fact, the Englishes spoken around the world display many ways of addressing others, all equally important in defining and understanding what kind of relationship holds between the speaker and the interlocutors. This work is an attempt to provide a detailed evidence-based description of the plural forms of the second person pronoun you. The analysis of naturally-occurring linguistic data uncovers the importance of these forms in defining social boundaries and expressing what the speaker thinks about the interlocutor(s). The corpus-based research focuses on the similarities and differences in the use of second person plural forms among twenty varieties of English. The corpus (GloWbe) contains 1.9 billion words collected on the web in 2012. The forms I have analysed are the result of both morphological and analytic strategies of number marking: yous(e), yi(s/z), yus, you guys, you all and y(')all, you two, you three, you four, you ones and y(ou)'uns/yin(s/z), you lot and other 'you + plural noun phrase' expressions. The aim of the research is provide an empirically informed description of the forms and functions of second person plural forms (2PL forms henceforth) in contemporary English. This is done by combining the analysis of corpus data with the literature on 2PL forms as well as the relevant theories on language change.