The Emergence of German Polite «Sie»: Cognitive and Sociolinguistic Parameters
No Customer Reviews
For a speaker of German the tone of personal interaction is set by his or her choice of address pronoun. Relationships are both created and reflected in the use of du or Sie in conversation. The Emergence of German Polite 'Sie' uncovers the sociocultural and cognitive linguistic strategies that originally brought the third person plural Sie address into the German language some three hundred years ago. Although a widely proposed explanation derives Sie from anaphora for plural abstractions of address like Euer Gnaden (Your Graces) empirical corpus analysis of historical texts does not bear this hypothesis out. Based on some 1'500 tokens of High and Low German usage from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and collected from original unedited sources, this study concludes that third person plural morphology was motivated by much broader conceptual metaphors and metonymies for sociopolitical power, pragmatic indirectness, and social discourse in early modern German-language communities.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0820438537
ISBN13:9780820438535
Release Date:January 1999
Publisher:Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
Length:373 Pages
Customer Reviews
0 rating
Copyright © 2025 Thriftbooks.com
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information | Cookie Policy | Cookie Preferences | Accessibility Statement
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
