Expressivity and Pronouns

Abstract This chapter investigates the connection between expressive meaning and personal pronouns. Drawing on cross-linguistic data, it addresses ways in which personal pronouns may affect the use of a sentence, and how their expressive meaning can be tested and classified. The chapter reviews the range of meanings that personal pronouns convey as deictic expressions and their relation with social hierarchies, gender, and identity. More attention is given to first and second person pronouns, as they refer to the essential participants in a speech event. The chapter discusses both argumental and non-argumental pronouns (“ethical datives”) and the analyses they have received in the recent semantic literature on use-conditional meaning and conventional implicature. Several phenomena are exemplified with data from European Portuguese, including expressive vocatives.