Politeness and courtesy in Malory's pronouns of address
Abstract
During the Middle and Early Modern periods of English, the language had two singular address pronouns, thou and you, with social factors such as familiarity and formality influencing when each was used. The system as it existed in Shakespeare’s time has received extensive study, and there has been considerable work on Chaucer’s time as well, but the intervening 15th century has gone largely overlooked. The current study analyzes 15th century literary use, taking the works of Sir Thomas Malory as data. The two most prominent theories of address pronoun variation—Brown and Gilman’s power and solidarity model (1960) and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory (1978)—are tested on the data. Power and solidarity explains address pronoun choice in terms of two continua, taking into account the relative social power of the speaker and hearer, and their similarities or familiarity. Politeness theory treats the choice of address pronoun in a more malleable way, manipulated by the speaker to achieve their aims by showing concern for the hearer’s self-image. The two theories are shown to be compatible, and together are able to account for over 90 percent of the address tokens in a representative sample from Malory. Other possible contributing factors, such as scribal error and collocational preferences, have been investigated, and in this paper an additional, speaker-based effect is suggested, in which Malory uses pronoun choice to indicate how courteous his characters are, with more courteous speakers using a greater proportion of you and less courteous speakers using more thou. A moderate correlation is established between the courtesy of characters and their proportion of you use. The results indicate that any explanation of address pronoun choice must take into account an array of contributing factors.
Degree
M.A.
Advisors
Niepokuj, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Linguistics|Medieval literature|British and Irish literature
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