Generic you - Citizendia

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In English grammar, generic you or indefinite you is the use of the pronoun you to refer to an unspecified person. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States Grammar is the field of Linguistics that covers the Rules governing the use of any given natural language. English grammar is a body of rules ( Grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language. In Traditional grammar, a contraction is the formation of a new Word from one or more individual words Disputed English grammar denotes disagreement about whether given constructions constitute correct English. A compound is a word composed of more than one Free morpheme. In the English language an English Honorific is something that is attached to but not usually part of a name e The personal pronouns of English can have various forms according to gender, number, person, and case. In the English Language, Nouns are inflected for Grammatical number —that is singular or Plural. This article is focused mainly on usage of English relative clauses Principal parts A regular English verb has only one principal part, the infinitive or dictionary form (which is identical to the simple present tense for all persons and This is a paradigm of English verbs that is a set of conjugation tables for the model regular verbs and for some of the most common irregular verbs The English language has a large number of Irregular verbs. In the great majority of these the Past participle and/or Past tense is In the English language, a modal auxiliary verb is an Auxiliary verb (or helping verb) that can modify the Grammatical mood (or mode Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct debates English grammar is a body of rules ( Grammar) specifying how phrases and sentences are constructed in the English language. In Linguistics and Grammar, a pronoun is a Pro-form that substitutes for a (including a noun phrase consisting of a single Noun) with or YOU' ' is a South African magazine which is the English version of the Afrikaans family magazine Huisgenoot. Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are either irrelevant or unknown in the context in which it is being discussed Generic one is the use of one in the same way. One is a pronoun in the English language. It is a gender neutral, third-person singular (though slightly anomalous pronoun commonly used in English prose

In casual English, the second person pronoun you often takes on the additional role of a generic pronoun. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others The generic mood, in Linguistics, is a mood used to make generalized comments about a class of thing The pronoun one can serve this function as well, but is rarely seen outside the most formal styles. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the use of this word as a pronoun in English "may have been influenced" by French on, which is not a number, but a descendant of Latin homo, "human being, person". The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) published by the Oxford University Press (OUP is a comprehensive Dictionary of the English French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people One's most common use is to represent the sense "I and other people", as in Jane Austen's:

I do not think him so very ill-looking as I did — at least one sees many worse. Jane Austen (16

— Mansfield Park (1814)

In some works of fiction, especially those written in second-person narrative, generic one is used to contrast with the you who refers to the narrating character specifically:

As long as one is at one's desk by ten-thirty, one is relatively safe. Mansfield Park is a Novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between 1812 and 1814. Year 1814 ( MDCCCXIV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common The second-person narrative is a Narrative mode in which the Protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person Personal pronouns Somehow you manage to miss this banker's deadline at least once a week.

— Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

Even in other formal situations, generic one is much less common than generic you when giving instructions, as it seems especially remote and stuffy. John Barrett McInerney Jr (born January 13, 1955 in Hartford Connecticut) (ˈmækənɝni is an American Writer. Bright Lights Big City is a Novel by the American author Jay McInerney, published by Vintage on August 12 Year 1984 ( MCMLXXXIV) was a Leap year starting on Sunday (link displays the 1984 Gregorian calendar) The genitive case is especially awkward: One should always wash one's hands. In Grammar, the genitive case or possessive case (also called the second case) is the case that marks a Noun as modifying another In more idiomatic speech, this would be rendered as You should always wash your hands. The imperfect domestication of generic one has caused respected writers to lose track of grammatical agreement, producing constructions such as one … they:

… in a nasty Scottish jail, where one cannot even get the dirt brushed off their clothes.

— Sir Walter Scott

one … he:

And one must be careful not to shoot himself. Sir Walter Scott 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 &ndash 21 September 1832 was a prolific Scottish Historical novelist and Poet popular throughout

— Stuart Chase, in The Tyranny of Words

and one … you:

When one is very old, as I am … your legs give in before your head does. Stuart Chase (1888-1985 Born in Somersworth New Hampshire was an American economist and engineer trained at MIT.

— George Bernard Shaw

Generic you, by contrast, creates no such difficulties. George Bernard Shaw ( (26 July 1856 &ndash 2 November 1950 was an Irish Playwright. Other circumlocutions are resorted to in English to avoid the awkwardness of generic one, such as resort to the passive voice. In Grammar, the voice (also called gender or diathesis of a verb describes the relationship between the action (or state that the verb expresses and the participants identified The idiomatic English translation of the French sentence Ici on parle français, literally, "here one speaks French" or "here someone speaks French", is "French is spoken here". Spanish, Portuguese and some other Romance languages resort to a reflexive verb in this context: se habla español/fala-se português, literally "Spanish/Portuguese speaks itself" but meaning "Spanish/Portuguese is spoken". Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all In Grammar, a reflexive verb is a Verb whose semantic agent and patient (typically represented syntactically by the subject and the direct object are the Since the more recent traditions of linguistic prescription and usage commentary in English also discourage the passive voice, this too may draw criticism. In Linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used

The phenomenon of generic you, though decried in the works of some still-read prescriptivist grammarians, is so widespread that it is nearly standard usage. The writer and usage commentator E. B. White wrote that:

As for me, I try to avoid the impersonal one but have discovered that it is like a face you keep encountering in the streets and can't always avoid bowing to. Elwyn Brooks "E B" White ( July 11, 1899 – October 1 1985) was an American writer

This is not the first case of a pronoun changing meaning, or acquiring an additional meaning, over time. The word you originally referred strictly to the second-person plural, being cognate with the German ihr and the French vous. Plural is a Grammatical number, typically referring to more than one of the Referent in the real world Cognates in Linguistics are words that have a common origin They may occur within a language such as shirt and skirt as two English words descended from The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people When the second-person singular form thou was abandoned, you absorbed its functions. The word thou ( in most dialects is a second person singular Pronoun in English.

Note that you can be ambiguous; it is not always obvious whether the generic you or a semantically second-person you is meant. For example, in "you never know what John is thinking about", you could as easily refer to the audience as to people in general. Sometimes stress and intonation can help convey the difference; for example, generic you is generally unstressed, a stressed you generally refers to the audience. In Linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain Syllables in a word In Linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch whilst speaking which is not used to distinguish words

Analogs in other languages

Second-person pronouns and structures are often used generically in other languages as well. In languages with more than one second-person pronoun — for example, due to a distinction between formal and informal pronouns (informal pronouns typically being used with family and close friends, and formal pronouns typically being used with social superiors and new acquaintances, though the line between these depends on the language; see T-V distinction), or due to a distinction between singular and plural or masculine and feminine — the rules for selecting a generic second-person pronoun may differ from the rules for selecting an ordinary second-person pronoun. In Sociolinguistics, a T-V distinction describes the situation wherein a Language has second-person Pronouns that distinguish varying levels of Russian, for example, has a pronoun ты, used as an informal singular, and a pronoun Вы, used as a plural and as a formal singular; but only ты is used generically, such that ты may be used generically in the same sentence as a Вы being used as a literal second-person pronoun. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages Similarly, in Darja (Arabic as spoken in the Maghreb), there are two distinct singular second-person pronouns, one masculine (used when addressing a man) and one feminine (used when addressing a woman); but when used as generic pronouns, the speaker uses the pronoun with the gender corresponding to his or her own sex, rather than that of the person he or she is addressing. Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language The Maghreb (المغرب العربي al-Maġrib al-ʿArabī) also rendered Maghrib (or rarely Moghreb) meaning "place of Sunset ^[1]

References

^ Souag, Lameen. Jabal al-Lughat: Impersonal vs. personal "you". Blog entry, posted 2007 September 9; accessed 2007 October 2.

Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (E. Ward Gilman, ed. ) Merriam-Webster, 1993. ISBN 0-87779-132-5

Analogs in other languages

References

See also