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THE INDEFINITE YOUEric Hyman Staels aa Fayetteville State University , Fayetteville, NC 28301-4298 , UnitedStates of AmericaPublished online: 02 Feb 2010.

To cite this article: Eric Hyman Staels (2004) THE INDEFINITE YOU , English Studies, 85:2, 161-176,DOI: 10.1080/00138380409609833

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THE INDEFINITE YOU1

Tommy Smyth: … It would have been much more advantageous to his teammates if he hadn’tbeen there. They probably could have got a goal out of it.J. P. DellaCamera: (chuckling) The way you can use the word ‘advantage’!Smyth: Are you talking about me now, or everybody?2

1. The English second personAll (or nearly all) languages, including English, divide their personal pronounsinto First, Second, and Third Persons, according to an imaginary or conven-tional scenario. These distinctions go back at least to Greek grammarians; itsmodern, canonical formulation is Jesperson’s: First Person is the person speak-ing; Second is those spoken to; and Third is neither First nor Second.3 Somelanguages – not including English – systematically mate their verbs morpholog-ically to distinctions in the personal pronouns. It is usually assumed that thepersonal pronoun system is one of the most stable components of a language,but in fact the personal pronoun system is more fluid than the canonical un-derstanding would have it, and the distinctions among First, Second, and ThirdPerson are less sharp than the standard paradigms set forth. For one exampleamong many, many: first person plural we can be used to mean second personyou: ‘We shouldn’t do that’; ‘How are we feeling today?’4 Or observe how Mar-garet Thatcher uses three different pronouns to refer to herself:

(1) ‘When I got [to Oxford] I think the first thing I learned was that for the first time in my lifeyou were totally divorced from your background. You go as an individual. So what did welearn?’5

This paper will reconsider the canonical understanding and formulation of theEnglish you. I need to make clear here that I am discussing only English and ammaking no cross-linguistic claims.

Table 1 sets out the canonical morphology and distribution of the EnglishPersonal Pronouns:

English Studies, 2004, 2, pp. 161-1760013-838X/04/02-0178/$16.00© 2004, Taylor & Francis Ltd.

1 A portion of this paper was read to the Modern Language Association meeting, 28 December2000, Washington D.C.

2 Excerpts from an exchange between Tommy Smyth and J. P. DellaCamera, telecast of theSenegal vs. Turkey World Cup match, 2002, ESPN. I am indebted to Sara Oswald for thispassage and for passages (13) (14) and (15) below.

3 Otto Jesperson, The Philosophy of Grammar (London and New York, 1924), p. 212.4 Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive

Grammar of the English Language (Harrow, 1985) (hereinafter cited as Quirk et al., Compre-hensive Grammar), p. 350; Katie Wales, Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English (Cam-bridge, 1996), pp. 67-8.

5 Quoted in Peter Mühlhäusler and Rom Harré, Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construc-tion of Social and Personal Identity (Oxford, 1990), pp. 168-9.

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Table 1: the English personal pronouns

Singular Plural

Nominative Objective Genitive Nominative Objective Genitive

First I me my we us our

Second you you your you you your

Third Masc. he him his they them theirThird Fem. she her her they them theirThird Neut. it it its they them their

The important thing to note in Table 1 is that the English Second Person you,unlike the other personal pronouns, does not distinguish between singular andplural, does not distinguish between nominative and objective case, and doesnot distinguish gender, as the Third Person does in the singular. (This will havean important implication later.) Nor does it distinguish between formal and in-formal Second Person, as some languages do and English once did, albeit spo-radically.

All this should be familiar. What might not be so familiar is that the canon-ical definition of the English second person you as ‘the person or persons spo-ken to’, what I will hereinafter refer to as the vocative-deictic you, does notaccount for a very common use of you, perhaps the most common use of you,as the following passages betoken (unless otherwise noted, all passages are fromAmerican newspapers):

(2) Being [a campus] president isn’t what it used to be.‘I’m spending a great deal of time outside the university, [John] La Tourette said. ‘YOU can’t beout on campus as much as YOU used to be. … YOU have to raise funds’.

(3) For me it began becoming one of my first personality traits. To be in any type of beautypageant as a contestant YOU must have poise, the right posture, walk, smile, and everythingelse. – from a student paper

(4) I wrestled with the fact every day that if the defendants were found guilty I would have todecide if they would live or die. No one in this world can understand how that feels until theyare placed in that position. Being in the courthouse every day, YOU learn things about others.One of the things I learned about [the defendant] was that she had not repented to God or ex-pressed any remorse for her actions since she had been arrested.

(5) ‘We were on welfare’, recalled [Sarah Jessica] Parker. … ‘I knew I was different from the kidswho pay for lunch or bring their lunch from home. It was a stigma thing. I was not the only per-son receiving a free lunch, but YOU are aware’.

(6) ‘He [Dusty Baker] always brings food in every day’, [Barry] Bonds said. ‘I got to have mygreens, macaroni and cheese. He always brings something He takes care of everybody When heknows YOU’re down and out, he does something to perk YOU up When you’re struggling, he’llsay: ‘Here, I brought YOU lunch. … Dusty knows every restaurant in every city, and he can getYOU whatever YOU want in any city’.

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(7) The former madam [Heidi Fleiss] also was quoted in Thursday’s newspaper as saying she re-cently has undergone cosmetic surgery on her lips, ears, eyes, and breasts. ‘Being in prison withno skin care really does a number on YOU’, she said. ‘YOU’re out in that recreation yard withthe sun beating down on YOU. It really ages YOU prematurely’.

(8) As the guest of a white female friend who reported musical events for a magazine, I had oc-cupied a seat in the orchestra section of Carnegie Hall without inciting protest. But shortly there-after I had been denied admission to a West Side cinema house that featured European movies.Then I learned that while one midtown restaurant would make YOU welcome, in another (lo-cated in Greenwich Village, Harlem’s twin symbol of Manhattan’s freedom), the waiters wouldgo through the polite motions of seating YOU but then fill YOUR food with salt. And to makecertain YOU got the message, they would enact a rite of exorcism in which the glasses and thecrockery, now hopelessly contaminated by YOUR touch, were enfolded in a napkin andsmithereened in the fireplace. … Or again, after arriving at a Central Park West apartment build-ing to deliver a music manuscript for the Tuskegee composer William L. Dawson, YOU en-countered a doorman with a European accent who was so rude that YOU were tempted to breakhis nose. – Ralph Ellison

(9) In one week and two days, I will be finished with nine months of treatment for cancer. Firstthey poison YOU; then they burn YOU. I‘ve had more fun. And when it’s almost over, YOU’regrateful to absolutely everyone And I am. … Being sick actually narrows YOUR world, I’mafraid – makes YOU focus more on YOURSELF. Maybe when it’s over and YOU don’t feellike crud all the time, then YOUR spirit soars. The chief reason to keep working is because ittakes YOUR mind off YOURSELF. … YOU can’t get through this without a lot of help fromYOUR friends. I had a party for all my helpers after I got through chemo. – Molly Ivins

(10) Down here I find myself alone often, YOU can walk for miles here and not see people. –from a student paper

(11) ‘You men just can’t understand the changes women go through every month or the effectthat having a baby has on YOU’. – from a student paper

(12) ‘I don’t think anybody runs Sid Bass’s life unless he wants YOU to run it’, says this man.6

In Passage (2) none of John La Tourette’s addressees are university presidentsIn Passage (3), none of the student writer’s addressees are beauty pageant con-testants. In Passage (7), few, if any, of Heidi Fleiss’s addressees are formermadams worried about skin care in the prison yard. The YOUs that I have cap-italized do not refer, mean, or stand for the actual addressees of the discourse,at least not primarily and certainly not exclusively. Lest one think this is anAmericanism, it does occur in British English:

(13) Now, though, I feel ashamed and repulsive. I can actually feel the fat splurging out from mybody. Never mind. Sometimes YOU have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order toemerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland as a purged and beautiful Michelle Pfeifferfigure. Tomorrow new Spartan health and beauty regime.7

(14) I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about the long-term future:I used to think – and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do – that all relationships need

THE INDEFINITE YOU

6 Suzanna Andrews, ‘Betting the Kingdom’, Vanity Fair (March 2002), p. 256.7 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, (New York, 1998), p. 16

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the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get YOU started and to push YOU over thehumps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and YOU have come to somethingapproaching a halt, YOU have a look around and see what YOU’ve got.8

(15) [Pauline Kael] had a profound effect, most of all on the acolytes she supported. The rest ofus tagged along behind. At the height of her career it was difficult to raise one’s voice sufficientlyto mask hers. But, particularly on non-American films, it was sometimes worth trying When shewas offbeam, she was very offbeam. When she was right, YOU felt YOU had in some way beenblessed.9

Wales gives fourteen tokens of this usage, thirteen of which are British.10 Ausage that is so widespread is deserving of greater attention than it has so farreceived.

This is only a small fraction of the examples I have collected since I first no-ticed the usage. Scarcely a day goes by that I do not observe one or several in-stances of this type of usage. This usage of you is omnipresent, everywhere –you might even say youbiquitous. Although it is impossible to do a rigorous sta-tistical survey, once I became aware of it, I have observed it far more frequent-ly than the canonical vocative-deictic you Indeed, this usage is so common thatit is, or is becoming, the unmarked category, and the canonical vocative-deicticyou sometimes has to be marked. Observe that William Berlin italicizes you tomake sure that the addressee you is understood:

(16) The 62nd round [of the baseball drafts] is baseball oblivion, a spot for wild shots in the darkand courtesy picks. You could be drafted in the 62nd round.11

2 The indefinite youThis use of you, to refer to persons other than the immediate addressees, has notgone unnoticed in the linguistics literature, but usually only in passing or buriedin footnotes. Jesperson mentions it,12 and so do Quirk et al.13 and Greenbaum.14

As far as I have been able to research, only Wales discusses this phenomenonat all extensively.15 A few prescriptive grammarians do take notice of this usagebut only in order to condemn it. This usage has been called ‘the generic you’,‘the impersonal you’, or ‘the so-called impersonal you’, but I am here calling it‘the indefinite you’ because I want to place it in the family of English indefiniteNPs like one, everyone, everybody, anybody, they, someone, a person, and thelike. I certainly don’t want to call it an impersonal, because sometimes it IS apersonal pronoun and sometimes an indefinite: one purpose of this paper is to

ERIC HYMAN

8 Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (New York, 1996), p. 90.9 Derek Malcolm, Obituary for Pauline Kael, The Guardian Weekly. 13-19 September 2001. p. 22.10 Personal Pronouns, pp. 78-8111 ‘The Season That Wasn’t’, The New York Times Magazine, 11 August 2002, p. 44.12 Philosophy of Grammar, pp. 215-16 esp. n. 1; Essentials of English Grammar (University of Al-

abama, 1964) 150-51; A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (Copenhagen, 1949)vol. 7, 152-6.

13 Pp. 182-3, 353-4, 387-8.14 Oxford English Grammar (Oxford, 1996), p. 17215 Pp. 58-9, 78-84.

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argue that the English you blends the personal and the indefinite.A minor philosophical paradox is called Grelling’s Paradox, wherein a word

is called autological if it describes itself and heterological if it doesn’t. Wordslike short, English, and polysyllabic are autological; words like long, French, andmonomorphemic are heterological (the paradox arises if you ask whether het-erological is itself autological or heterological).16 I shall borrow Grelling’s ter-minology to argue that indefinite is an autological term, that is, indefinitedescribes itself (I cannot give a precise, scientifically acceptable definition) aswell as indicating its meanings and functions, and that is much of what makesindefinite pronouns, especially you, so useful. Not only can no systematic ac-count be given of what indefinite yous refer to, but even what any individualtoken of an indefinite you refers to (if anything) is enormously variable, de-pending partly on each hearer’s or reader’s interpretation, guess, or uncertain-ty

Furthermore, I am broadening the term indefinite for use in several senses.Primarily I mean indefinite in its semantic, especially ordinary language, sense:‘not precise’, ‘not having exact or clearly identified boundaries’. But also I amproposing indefinite as a third grammatical number, neither singular nor plur-al, nor both, nor even neither, but indefinite,17 and a fourth grammatical gen-der, not masculine nor feminine nor even neuter but indefinite. And, of course,the main thrust of this paper is to argue that you is often of indefinite gram-matical person, sometimes denoting the speaker, sometimes denoting generical-ly or indefinitely nearly everybody or anybody, and sometimes even denotingthe person(s) addressed, and very often denoting some overlap of two or moregrammatical persons.

Furthermore, as I argue below, the meanings, references, or interpretations ofsome/many occurrences of the indefinite you sometimes change within the ut-terance;18 they are unstable, dynamic, which is both contributory to and a prod-uct of the indefiniteness.

As I mentioned earlier, referring to Table 1, English you is quite convenientas an indefinite because it does not distinguish number (especially), gender, orformality.19 Some of the other English indefinites seem to denote number – forexample, everyone (singular) and they (plural) – which sometimes causes issuesof agreement with antecedents, at least in formal, conventional, handbook Eng-lish. That you can also be plural is especially important, because plurality is in

THE INDEFINITE YOU

16 Encyclopedia of Philosophy. vol. 5 (New York and London, 1965) s.v. Logical Paradoxes, p.47; R.M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 147-8.

17 Bengt Jacobsson, ‘A Note on Common Number they/them/their and who’, Studia Neophilo-logica 40 (1968), 141-6, makes a similar point for they and who, though not for you. He callsthem ‘common-number pronouns’.

18 I am using utterance to mean a small group of sentences, written, spoken, or written to recre-ate speech, that can be thought of as a more or less coherent unit of discourse. The passagesI have reproduced or created here as illustrative tokens are what I mean by utterances. Becausemost of the occurrences of the indefinite you that I have found are representations of speech,I shall be using the terms speaker and hearer rather than writer and reader.

19 That is, you does not overtly or morphologically encode degrees of formality.

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itself one step towards indefiniteness: dogs, some dogs, those dogs are alreadyautomatically more indefinite than the singular dog, the dog, that dog. You notbeing marked for gender is also quite convenient for an indefinite.20 Present-Day English not having a morphological distinction between formal and infor-mal second-person pronouns facilitates indefinite you, because opportunisticallyit can either contain or ignore differences: users don’t have to worry aboutwhich form is appropriate, especially when the reference might be mixed. Thisone-form-fits-all quality of you is what makes you so attractive as an indefinite,because an indefinite pronoun, by its very nature and purpose, needs to attractas many potential referents as possible.

Let us consider the relationship between the vocative-deictic you and the in-definite you. While I consider them distinct I do not consider them discontinu-ous. A survey of Passages (1)-(15) should show that the indefinite you nearlyalways has a wider range of potential referents than the vocative-deictic youhas. Although the canonicity of the vocative-deictic you would suggest other-wise, it just might be that the indefinite you is the general case and that thevocative-deictic you is a subset or special case of the indefinite.

English lacks a distinction between an exclusive we (the speaker and immedi-ate associates) and an inclusive we (the speaker, immediate associates, and ad-dressees),21 so this use of you would sometimes be a device to create orimprovise an inclusive we. Recall, however, that many or most of the yous in-clude persons well beyond addressees, even potential addressees, and for someof these tokens, e.g. (2), (3), (5), (6), (7), (12), very many, probably most, po-tential addressees could not naturally be part of an inclusive we.

Another possibility is that the indefinite you is an elliptical or truncated con-ditional expression: ‘if YOU are … then YOU would … ’ Passages (17) and (18)are overt examples of this construction:

(17) It’s the gift-giving season’, said Lori Holly, manager of Hecht’s department store. ‘YOUneed to have the merchandise presented as cleanly as possible’.

‘If YOU’re a retailer, YOU can’t afford to be the second person to put it [i.e. displays ofChristmas merchandise] up’, said Erik Gordon, director of the University of Florida’s retail cen-ter. ‘At the end of all the weeks of ho-ho-ho, YOU can’t afford to be the guy without the dough-dough-dough’.

(18) ‘A second reason is that the education level of society has come up in the last 20 years, andthe message is clear in the mind of the better-educated public that if YOU want to commit acrime, fraud is the way to go’. – Joseph T. Wells22

ERIC HYMAN

20 The use of they to resolve problems of gender bias has been widely discussed; see, for example,Wales, Personal Pronouns, pp. 119-33, and Michael Newman, Epicene Pronouns: The Linguis-tics of a Prescriptive Problem (New York and London, 1997). Quirk et al., ComprehensiveGrammar, p. 770, mention in passing the possibility of using you.

21 That is, English lacks a formal, grammaticalized morphological or lexical distinction The dis-tinction can sometimes be rendered contextually or pragmatically.

22 Qtd. in Steven Labaton, ‘Downturn and Shift in Population Feed Boom in White-CollarCrime’, New York Times, 2 June 2002, 1, 22.

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As a by-product of the indefinite you’s tendency to generalize, extending theco-reference beyond its antecedent often yields a gnomic quality, something likemoral instruction:

(19) ‘YOU’re always in this thing for the ultimate goal: to win the Stanley Cup’, he says. …‘After that I decided I never wanted to coach again’, Cheevers says. ‘YOU have to be a 24/7 guy,and I just don’t think I’m the type’.23

(20) [José] Higueras, a former [tennis] clay-court specialist and now a consultant to the USTA,has recommended that the organization build more clay courts and sponsor trips to Europe foryoung talented American players. ‘When YOU don’t have experience’, Higueras says, ‘YOU geton clay and end up playing against the surface as well as YOUR opponent’.24

(21) The tone of Janice’s [correspondence] was more reasonable than her mother’s: YOU coulddo an awful lot, she always said, if YOU kept the correspondence pleasant.25

(22) ‘When YOU get an M.B.A., to be creative, YOU’ve got to start a business’, [Toby Lenk]says. ‘When YOU do that, YOU’re at the top of the food chain in terms of respect’.26

Again, observe in (19) and (22), especially, the dynamic extension of a narrow-ly construed first denotation, perhaps the single speaker himself, to the moregeneral, indefinite applicability. (3) and (4) also might contain a gnomic qual-ity.

3. The anaphoric youWhen the yous in these tokens refer to, or include, the person(s) addressed theyare exophoric in Halliday and Hasan’s sense.27 But an examination of (1)through (15) will show that the YOUs also often, if not usually, refer to some-one mentioned in the discourse and are therefore anaphoric – or are alsoanaphoric. For example, in (2) the YOU is ‘a university president’; in (4) theYOU is ‘they [who] are placed in that position’; in (12) the YOU means ‘any-body [who] runs Sid Bass’s life’; in (6) the antecedent is explicitly everybody andimplicitly any member of the baseball team Dusty Baker manages.

(23) Outside Longmont, 35 miles north of [Denver], Jack Osborne, 69, stood in his kitchen –lined with wallpaper and knickknacks depicting his favorite fowl – raised his hands and cut a 6-by-8-inch cube into the air. ‘It’s inhumane to put a chicken in a cage this small’, he said with agrimace. ‘YOU can’t even lift YOUR wings’.28

THE INDEFINITE YOU

23 Gerry Cheevers, qtd. in Mark Beech, ‘Gerry Cheevers, Goaltender’, Sports Illustrated Vol. 96No. 24, 10 June 2002, 19-20.

24 L. John Wertham, ‘Clay Pigeons’, Sports Illustrated Vol. 96 No. 24 (June 10, 2002), 98.25 Robert Barnard, Death of a Salesperson and Other Untimely Exits (New York, 1989), 5826 Qtd. in Michael Sokolove, ‘How to Lose $850 Million – And Not Really Care’, The New York

Times Magazine, 9 June 2002, 66.27 M. A. K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Cohesion in English (Harlow, 1986) 31-57 esp. 33.28 Alex Markels, ‘A Marketing Cry: Don’t Fence Them In’, The New York Times, 1 September,

2002, Section 3, 6.

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In (23), while it is literally true and barely possible that the YOU could refer tothe addressees, the YOU and YOUR are much more clearly anaphoric to achicken.

Observe how many of the antecedents of you in the passages above are I orme explicitly (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (8) (9) (10) (13) (14) or I implicitly (7) (11) (15)(19).29 The shift from first person to second then might be, in part, a politenessmaneuver, to reduce or deny egocentricity.30

In my survey of the linguistics literature on anaphora,31 I have never beenable to find any consideration that second-person pronouns could be anapho-ra. Halliday and Hasan explicitly rule out second-person pronouns as anapho-ra.32 Although anaphoric pronouns are often explicitly described as beingthird-person,33 nobody seems to have stated, much less proved, that anaphoramust be third person only. Rather, it seems to be tacitly – that is, unreflective-ly – assumed that only third-person pronouns could be anaphora.34 So I haveno theoretical basis for treating the indefinite you as sometimes anaphoric. In-stead my claim is based on observation of what these yous are doing.

One might argue – you might argue – that once you becomes an indefinitepronoun it relinquishes its second-personhood and becomes effectually just an-other third-person. But I am claiming that while the indefinite you certainly in-cludes the third-person, which is, after all, much of its function, it neverthelessalso retains and includes its original second-personhood, at least potentially orvestigially.35

4. The dynamic extended anaphorMoreover, when the indefinite you is being used anaphorically, it is not always,or even usually, exactly co-extensive or co-referential with its antecedent, as isnormally assumed to be the function of anaphora.36 Paradoxically, perhaps

ERIC HYMAN

29 Jan A. van Ek and Nico J. Rabat, The Student’s Grammar of English (Oxford, 1984), p. 150,notice this phenomenon but apparently don’t recognize – or at least label – it as anaphoric:‘Contrary to what one might expect, you is often used – informally – to refer vaguely to thespeaker/writer himself or herself’.

30 Although Mühlhäusler and Harré, Pronouns and People, are primarily concerned with inter-personal functions of personal pronouns, they never consider this usage of you.

31 E.g. Talmy Givón, English Grammar: A Function-Based Introduction (Amsterdam, Philadel-phia, 1993); Dwight Bolinger, Pronouns and Repeated Nouns (Bloomington, Indiana, 1977);Barbara Fox, Discourse Structure and Anaphora: Written and Conversational English (Cam-bridge, 1987); Ronald H. Smyth, Cognitive Aspect of Anaphora Judgment and Resolution,(Bloomington, Indiana, 1986); Rodney Huddleston, Introduction to the Grammar of English(Cambridge, 1984), pp. 272-98.

32 Cohesion, p. 48. But they hedge slightly with adverbs like normally and typically; and see p.51.

33 E.g. Peter Bosch, Agreement and Anaphora: A Study of the Role of Pronouns in Syntax andDiscourse (London, 1983), p. 228 n.37; Wales, Personal Pronouns, p. 22.

34 Transformational grammar accounts of anaphora are only concerned with third-person pro-nouns and NPs. In large measure, this is because transformational grammars consider onlysingle-sentence syntax and many, many of my tokens represent multiple sentences.

35 Quirk et al., Comprehensive Grammar, 354.36 How – or even whether – pronouns refer is a very complex issue in linguistics and philosophy,

beyond the scope of this essay. For an excellent survey, see Bosch, Agreement and Anaphora,

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counterintuitively, and certainly contra standard assumptions, it is the indefi-niteness of you that makes its anaphoricity so useful, maybe even possible. I usethe term ‘semi-co-referential’ to mean that the you and its antecedent both co-refer to some referent, either given or contextually obvious, and that the indef-inite you anaphor also refers to something else beyond, and other than, theoriginal antecedent’s referent. That is, the indefinite you moves or extends fromits narrow antecedent, be that the vocative-deictic you, I, or something else fair-ly specific, to something wider, more generic, and indefinite. It is certainly a ma-neuver to generalize beyond the single individual. Recall that the English you’slack of morphological distinction between singular and plural makes this ex-tension possible. I call this function of the indefinite you a Dynamic ExtendedAnaphor, or DEA. (I once thought of calling it the Indefinite Dynamic Extend-ed Anaphor, but the resulting acronym seemed too contrived.) Passage (5) showsthis dynamic extension especially clearly: ‘I was not the only person receiving afree lunch, but YOU are aware’. Observe the movement, the broadening of ref-erence, from I to not the only person to you.

Passage (10) also shows this extension well: ‘Down here I find myself aloneoften, YOU can walk for miles here and not see people’. (To illustrate both theexpansion and the anaphoric quality of the you I have retained the originalcomma, rather than a more orthographically standard colon or period.)

I do not here give a precise definition of ‘semi-co-referential’, not because Ibelieve that the intuitive, pre-theoretic understanding of the term will suffice (itwon’t), but rather because the notion of indefiniteness is part and parcel of theterm Not only can no systematic account be given of what indefinite yous referto, but even what any individual token of an indefinite you refers to (if any-thing) is enormously variable, depending on each hearer’s or reader’s interpre-tation, guess, or uncertainty. As the intra-utterance meanings of an indefiniteyou develop, the indefiniteness increases, in part because it is impossible to pin-point just when and where the change is occurring.

When an anaphor and its antecedent or referent are not congruent, it wouldseem that DEAs are incoherent. While it is true that ambiguity of interpretationdoes occasionally occur, DEAs give more trouble to syntacticians, especiallythose who think of syntax as algorithmic, than they do to actual users of Eng-lish. If one allows for dynamism within language, even within a single utterance,then DEAs’ broadening of reference provides a different kind of cohesion: theoriginal narrow or specific antecedent or reference is included within the broad-er meaning. You could think of it as cohesion by generalizing; or the next levelup in a hierarchy coherently includes the lower levels. By analogy with Linneanclassification, a genus gives cohesion by way of greater inclusiveness to each ofits species, and each species gives cohesion by way of greater inclusiveness toeach of its individual organisms.

5. The existential expletive youParadoxically, as the indefinite you can expand to include potentially almostanybody, or anybody salient, it can also contract, in constructions of you +have (sometimes you + modal) to become an existential expletive, to refer to or

169

THE INDEFINITE YOU

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include persons not definable or identifiable at all. Existential expletives substi-tute for nothing at all (what is the it in it is raining?). English has the existen-tial expletive constructions it plus is/was; there plus the copula; and they have,37

similar to German es gibt, man hat. While the indefinite you + have as an exis-tential expletive is less common than the other existential expletive construc-tions, it does occur:

(24) ‘YOU have overcapacity [in the telecom industry] and a slowdown in business spending’,said Chris Brown, a fund manager at Pax World Balanced Fund. ‘The combination of the twois just devastating for the whole area’.38

(25) ‘Crime is largely a factor of age, and fraud is the crime of choice of the older perpetrator,so as the society ages YOU have, and should continue to see, an increase of fraud cases’.39

(26) ‘But the 1950s are very interesting because YOU had the Korean War, YOU had Joe Mc-Carthy, and YOU had the rise of John F. Kennedy’. – Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The 1950s were some forty to fifty years ago, so many of Schlesinger’s ad-dressees were not born, and those yous who were not alive (and even those whowere) could not literally have had anything. Schlesinger’s ‘YOU had the KoreanWar, YOU had Joe McCarthy, and YOU had the rise of John F. Kennedy’ isequivalent to ‘There was the Korean War, there was Joe McCarthy, and therewas the rise of John F. Kennedy’. The subjects in existential expletive construc-tions have lost all, or nearly all, lexical, objective, or semantic meaning. Whenyou get to the existential expletive you, you have no you there.

I have presented a range of meanings of you from the (fairly) precise voca-tive-deictic you (the canonical second-person addressee you), through variousindefinite and anaphoric yous, to the existential expletive you. Let me make itclear that these various yous do not fall into clearly defined categories but forma continuum of overlapping, fuzzy areas. Any given token of the indefinite youcould fall anywhere on that continuum. A diagram or paradigm of the varioususes of the indefinite you would mislead by presenting a false impression of pre-cision. Nor do readers or hearers have to assign the same meaning or scope orreference to any one indefinite you: you may very well not accept some of myreadings of some of the passages I have presented here. The indefinite you isfluid, even unstable, dynamic in both its speaker’s intent and its hearers’ inter-pretation.

6. Discomfort with indefinite youFrances Austin observes that occasions of the vocative–deictic you and the in-definite you can be ambiguous.40 That ambiguity is exemplified in the exchange

ERIC HYMAN

esp. 1-31.37 Quirk et al. Comprehensive Grammar, pp. 1402-14. What I am calling an ‘expletive’ Quirk et

al. Comprehensive Grammar, call a ‘pseudo-subject’, p. 756 n.a., and is frequently called a‘dummy subject’.

38 Lisa Levenson, Bloomberg News, 24 July 2002.39 Wells, qtd. in Labaton (see n. 14).

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between DellaCamera and Smyth in this article’s epigraph and in the followingexchange between fictional English schoolgirls:

(27) ‘Haven’t you noticed?’ said the girl.‘No’, said Kim.‘He looks at you funny’, she said.‘At me?’ said Kim astonished.‘No! At everyone’.41

Observe that the first girl in Passage (27) uses you quite differently in consecu-tive utterances.

Or what tone is intended might not be clear. In consecutive sentences, Jes-person says of the indefinite you both ‘an emotional colouring is particularlystrong in you with its more or less apparent appeal to the person spoken to’ and‘with no real reference to the person addressed, very often with a tinge of con-tempt’.42

But, almost a half century ago, in a journal written by and for college Eng-lish instructors, Dora Jean Ashe discusses the contradiction between the ‘im-peccable authority of English Grammar books’ and the actual practice of herfreshmen composition students. She concludes, tentatively and gingerly, that‘[i]t seems reasonable to conclude that the pronoun “you” can be used effec-tively and correctly when it is carefully made to refer to a specific reader orgroup of readers … and when it refers to the reader and all other members ofthe human race’.43 Note that she conceives of you as primarily and preferably asecond person pronoun.

The polysemy and indefiniteness of the DEA lead quite a few grammariansto distrust the indefinite you. Prescriptivist handbooks assume, tacitly, and per-haps without thinking, that a pronoun and its antecedent must correspond one-to-one, in large measure because they assume – sometimes quite explicitly – thatpronouns are substitutes for some pre-existing specific noun or NP.44 And sosome prescriptivist handbooks are uncomfortable with the indefinite you. Pas-sages (28) and (29) were taken from a workbook that demands its studentsrewrite the yous to she and we respectively:

(28) Fran likes to shop at the factory outlet because YOU can buy discount clothing there.⇒ Fran likes to shop at the factory outlet because she can buy discount clothing there.

THE INDEFINITE YOU

40 Personal communications to the author, 18 December 2001, 6 February 2002.41 Jill McGown, A Shred of Evidence (New York, 1995), p. 88.42 Essentials of English Grammar, p. 151.43 ‘One Can Use an Indefinite “You” Occasionally, Can’t You?’ College English 14 no. 4 (Janu-

ary 1953) 216-219. Kenneth G. Wilson, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English(New York, 1993) p. 473, s.v. you: ‘Indefinite you, used when you’re addressing nobody in par-ticular, as in When you hike in the woods, you take a risk of encountering ticks, used to be crit-icized by teachers as a misuse of the pronoun, but it is clearly Standard in all but the mostFormal or Oratorical’. Observe Wilson’s When YOU’re addressing’.

44 For example, John Langan, Sentence Skills: A Workbook for Writers, 6th Edition Form B An-notated Instructor’s Edition (Boston, 1999), p. 169; Thomas P. Klammer and Muriel R.Schulz, Analyzing English Grammar, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1996), pp. 62-63.

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(29) From where we stood, YOU could see three states.⇒From where we stood, we could see three states.45

(I don’t know whether these two examples are actual examples or were manu-factured by the handbook’s writer.) Langan calls these shifts to you ‘inconsis-tent pronoun point of view’ and condemns them as ‘mistakes’.46 Langan is quitecorrect that these are shifts, but he misses the salient point: the writer is ex-tending and generalizing. Fran is not the only one who can buy discount cloth-ing at the factory outlet, nor are ‘we’ the only ones who could see three statesfrom that standpoint. Rhetorically, the writer’s extension from first- or third-person is more inclusive, to incorporate the addressees, the audience, and/or in-definitely or infinitely anyone else into the writer’s referential domain.

Klammer and Schultz, Analyzing English Grammar, believe that they and you‘normally refer to specific persons or antecedents [so] their use as indefinitestends to be contradictory’. They urge that Passage 30(a) be rewritten as 30(b):

(30a) You can’t find a house for less than $250,000 in our town.

(30b) There are no houses available for less than $250,000 in our town.47

I find it surprising that a grammar book is so uncomfortable with indefinitepronouns that it would even prefer the existentialist expletive construction thereare. (As he might suggest that the You in (30a) be written to something like po-tential home buyers.)

Some grammarians, particularly those of a prescriptivist bent, are concernedwith a distinction between formality, as in academic writing, and informality, asin speech, and therefore dislike the indefinite you. Theodore M. Bernstein isperhaps typical:

In the sense of one, the word you can convey directness and informality in writing: ‘The sci-entists have never demonstrated that if you lower blood cholesterol by change in diet, you alsodecrease the rise of heart attack and hardening of the arteries’. Like any other writing device,this one should not be overdone. In particular it is to be avoided if it suggests that the writer istalking down to the reader (‘You had better get your tax return into the mail by tonight’) or ifit might seem so personal as to be offensive (‘You won’t have a hangover tomorrow if you skipsome of those nightcaps tonight’) or if it is far-fetched or unnatural (‘If your pet ostrich has shin-gles, you ought to see a veterinarian’).48

A preference for formality is an aesthetic value judgment, to some degree per-sonal and subjective, beyond my ability to address, much less settle.

This discomfort with the indefinite you, I think, rests on four premises: one,that you is (or should only be) an exophor for direct address; two, that pro-nouns are substitutes for some other extant NP, either explicitly nearby in the

ERIC HYMAN

45 Langan, Sentence Skills pp. 176, 177. I have capitalized the YOUs.46 Ibid. pp. 174-78.47 Klammer and Schulz, Analyzing English Grammar, p. 70. My number (30a, b) is their (38) a,b.48 The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage (New York, 1965), pp. 486-487, s.v.

you. By serendipitous coincidence, Bernstein’s book happens to be shelved in my university’slibrary immediately next to Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point: A Guide to Punctuation and itsAllies (rpt. London, 1977).

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discourse (anaphor and cataphor) or implicitly in the context of the discourse(exophor); three, that polysemy and multifunctionality can lead to ambiguity,maybe even confusion; and four, that the meaning and/or scope of reference ofa given expression is stable at least within a single utterance. These premisesseem reasonable, but they ought not go unexamined.

The first premise is clearly belied by the evidence. The second premise hasbeen modified in the linguistics literature.49 One formulation is that a pronoundoes not substitute for a noun but that the noun and the pronoun co-refer tothe same entity:50 in the children thought they were safe, the they does not somuch as substitute for the children as they and the children co-refer to the sameset of young people. And pronouns substitute for, or co-refer to, NPs ratherthan single nouns, except when the NP happens to be a single noun. Consider

(31) The family looked for the basket with the flowers in it, but it was on the table all along.

The co-referent of the first it is basket or the basket, but the second it co-refersto the entire NP the basket with the flowers in it. In the ‘notorious’ sentence, Awise man gives his paycheque to his wife; a foolish one gives it to his mistress,51

the it, which appears to substitute for his paycheque, necessarily refers to a dif-ferent paycheque, just as each his refers to different men. And the first- and sec-ond-person pronouns do not normally substitute for actual, stated nouns at allbut for participants, or imagined participants, in the discourse. In the presentanalysis, a DEA does not substitute for its antecedent but expands it into some-thing either larger or entirely different; and the existential expletive you substi-tutes for nothing at all.

The third and fourth premises, that you can be ambiguous and unstable between the vocative–deictic you and one of the avatars of the indefinite you,have considerable merit. But ambiguity is not quite the evil it is sometimesmade out to be. For one thing, ambiguity that genuinely results in misunder-standing does not really occur that often: it is partly a bugaboo of handbookwriters. In conversation, where the indefinite you is more likely to occur, thereoften will be phonological and intonational cues to indicate what is meant.52

THE INDEFINITE YOU

49 For example, Wales, Personal Pronouns, pp. 1-5; Peter Matthews, The Concise Oxford Diction-ary of Linguistics (1997), s.v. pronoun; Dwight Bolinger, ‘Pronouns in Discourse’, in Syntaxand Semantics 12: Discourse and Syntax, ed. Talmy Givón (New York, 1979), 289-309; Bosch,Agreement and Anaphora, pp. 1-31.

50 Halliday and Hassan, Cohesion, passim, but esp. p. 3, pp. 31-33, 306-309; Mühlhäusler andHarré, Pronouns and People, pp. 49-55.

51 I found this sentence in Bosch, Agreement and Anaphora, pp. 141-4, where it is attributed toLauri Karttunen. ‘Notorious’ is Bosch’s term.

52 M. Stanley Whitley, ‘Person and Number in the Use of We, You, and They’, American Speech 53(1978), 18-38, esp. 24-5, observes phonological and semantic restraints on the indefinite you (hecalls it the impersonal you), among them that the indefinite you cannot be stressed. But the Della-Camera-Smyth interchange and Passage (26) show that the distinction between stressed personalyou and unstressed indefinite you is not always strong enough to be foolproof. Whitley also claimsthat you followed by a relative clause, e.g. ‘You who do such a thing should know better’, musthave a personal construal. While such a construction probably does include the personal, it alsoclearly expands into an indefinite NP. Dwight Bolinger, ‘To Catch a Metaphor: You as Norm’,American Speech 54 (Fall 1979), 194-209, elegantly refutes Whitley.

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And, as the DellaCamera-Smyth exchange and Passage (30) show, participantsin a conversation can ask for, and presumably receive, clarification.

But beyond that I am claiming that this polysemy and dynamism are some-times even a virtue: what you lose in formal precision you gain in rhetorical ef-fectiveness. More powerfully for my argument, the ambiguity and the instabilitydon’t even matter, for the vocative-deictic you is included as a component of theindefinite you; and even more powerfully, as I argue in §4 above, the indefiniteyou often is a dynamic extension of the vocative-deictic you anyway.

What I am arguing for is the fundamental opportunism of language: the in-definite you serves a purpose, a purpose that outranks or supersedes the formalneatness of a one-to-one correspondence between lexeme and referent. The flex-ibility and wider scope of the indefinite you compensates for whatever degree ofimprecision it may have. Granted, an indefinite you, especially a DEA, to someextent shifts the hermeneutic opportunity from the speaker to the hearer, andthat could be thought of as a violation of the speaker’s obligation to be clearand precise, and it does increase the risk of misunderstanding. But the use of in-definiteness, even a mid-utterance switch to indefiniteness, does serve the speak-er’s purpose in generalizing – that is, the indefiniteness IS the message – and ifhearers perceive the indefiniteness (and subconscious perception will do), thencommunication has been achieved. Often enough, a perfect congruence betweenspeaker’s intent and hearer’s understanding, if ever even possible, is neither ne-cessary nor always desirable.

AFTERWORD

SAmE’s you-all/y’all.It is usually believed that Southern American English you-all or y’all53 is theplural form of the pronoun you.54 As a northerner who moved to North Car-olina in 1987 I too believed that, until one day I was transacting some business

ERIC HYMAN

53 Because this term is a regionalism, non-standard in most dialects, and somewhat stigmatized,its spelling and pronunciation vary. I will be using the spelling you-all in this essay, not as anindication of my preference, but because my focus is on the morpheme {–all}. The term issometimes pronounced as a disyllable [ju:ɔ:l] but more usually as a monosyllable [jɔ:l] or [ja:l](these transcriptions are very broad: individual pronunciations will vary considerably).

54 Ray Cunningham, Southern Talk: A Disappearing Language (Asheville, NC, 1993), p. 177;Wilburn Love, Speaking Southern: A Dixie Lexicon (Minden, LA, 1994), p. 42; Norman E.Eliason, Tarheel Talk: An Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860(Chapel Hill, 1956); rpt. (New York, 1980), pp. 238, 239; Quirk, et al. Comprehensive Gram-mar, 344n; Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar, p. 167. Cunningham must be aware thatyou-all can be used in the singular because he writes ‘never (correctly) used to address one per-son’. Wilson, Columbia Guide, p. 473, says you-all ‘is almost always plural’. Lowry Axley,‘”You All and We All” Again’, American Speech 2 (May 1927), 343-4: ‘The idea that you-allis used in the South by any class of people as a form of address to one person is a hydra-head-ed monster that sprouts more heads than apparently can ever be cut off’. Axley is rebuttingEstelle Rees Morrison, ‘”You-All and We-All”’, American Speech 2 (December 1926), 133,who claims the usage of you all as a singular among ‘the humbler classes’ and is a ‘respectfulsuffix’.

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at the university cashier’s office and the clerk said to me ‘You-all sign here’. Iwas taken aback, because I was the only one present, the only one she couldhave been addressing, the only one who could possibly have signed here. You-all was clearly and unmistakably used to address and refer to me and only me,a singular entity. Alerted to the possibility that you-all could be used for a sin-gular referent. I have since observed it being used to address only one personThat you-all is the plural form of you is a myth, albeit a well-entrenched one.You-all does not mark the plural, at least not in the sense that it distinguishesplural from singular.55

Indeed, if you were to look carefully at you-all you should be able to see thatit is not a plural form. For no English word, pronoun or noun, was ever plu-ralized by adding {-all}, either preposed or postposed.56 Consider

(32) Miki ate all the chocolate cheesecake

does not mean that Miki ate more than one chocolate cheesecake. Miki couldhave eaten only one chocolate cheesecake; indeed Miki could have eaten con-siderably less than one chocolate cheesecake.57 All does not at all mark plurali-ty, and the supposition that it does accounts for the persistence of the myth, inthe face of contrary evidence, that you-all must be a plural. Rather all marksentirety. In fact, if the speaker of (32) wanted to indicate that Miki ate morethan one chocolate cheesecake, she more likely than not would have put a plur-al marker on chocolate cheesecake:

(32a) Miki ate all the chocolate cheesecakes.

For that matter, whether all is even plural at all is not clear. When all is part ofa Determiner Phrase, its grammatical number is determined by the subsequentnoun: all the chocolate cheesecakes are eaten vs. all the chocolate cheesecake iseaten. When all is a pronoun, what number it is and hence what number its verbwould be depends on the underlying antecedent (which might have to beguessed at):

(33) All is forgiven [= that one trespass, or a collective set of trespasses, is forgiven]

(34) All are gone [=all my companions have died]

As I suggest for you in §2 above, all’s grammatical number is indefinite.Thus, and more importantly, all is a pragmatic salience marker. In (32) Miki

did not eat all the chocolate cheesecake in the world but ate all the remaining

THE INDEFINITE YOU

55 Thomas Wentworth, American Dialect Dictionary (New York, 1944), s.v. you-all, y’all gets itright by subdividing the entry into three sections, for plural, singular, and ‘an unspecifiednumber’. Wales, Personal Pronouns, p. 76, acknowledges ‘the evidence is conflicting’ and citesE. C Hills, ‘The Plural Forms of “You”’, American Speech 2 (December 1926), 133; Axley,ibid.; and Gina Richardson, ‘Can Y’all Function as a Singular Pronoun in Southern Dialect?’,American Speech 59 (1984), 51-9.

56 Paul J. Hopper and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Grammaticalization (Cambridge, 1993), p. 150.57 I have chosen cheesecake as my exemplar because it can be either a count or non-count (mass)

noun. Non-count nouns, of course, cannot be pluralized at all.

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chocolate cheesecake, or all the chocolate cheesecake under present considera-tion, which could have ranged from several chocolate cheesecakes to only onesmall morsel.

So if you-all is not a plural form, then what is it? There are three possibilit-ies.

1. You-all is the only form of the second-person available in a speaker’s idiolect. This is un-likely.

2. You-all is a register marker, indicating friendliness or respectfulness.58 I do not mean thatyou-all and you are grammatically distinct formality markers, like French tu/vous, Germandu/Sie, or Spanish tu/Usted, but that you-all pragmatically marks a casual or welcoming socialcontext. This may be partly the case, at least in some idiolects, and intersects with:

3. You-all is a vocative-deictic to delineate, mark out, or call attention to the person(s) ad-dressed, as betokened by the cashier telling me ‘You-all sign here’. That is, the {-all} morphememarks salience, as I claimed above. I think this is indeed the case, but it brings up the larger,more important question of why you-all would exist at all, since English already seems to havethe perfectly good second person vocative-deictic you. But, as I hope the preceding discussionhas demonstrated, you is not – or is no longer – only a second-person vocative deictic; and as Isuggest above, you as the pronoun of direct address might not even be its most common or un-marked usage. Because you has a widespread function as an indefinite pronoun and DEA, aclearly marked second person-vocative-deictic is now useful, though not yet absolutely necessary,and SAmE’s you-all is one device that could fill the bill. An especially clear instance of SamE’sdistinction between the vocative-deictic you-all and the indefinite you was provided by my uni-versity’s attorney (who is presumably not a member of Morrison’s ‘humbler classes’). In a for-mal, public setting, addressing the faculty on legal issues, she often said something like ‘Nowyou-all listen carefully: when YOU do consulting work for an outside agency, YOU must reportit’. The you-all is direct address, delineating her immediate hearers; the YOU is the indefinitepronoun. While the people might be the same, the referents aren’t: you-all is those people hereand now; you is those people later on, out of earshot, doing their consultancies.

As so often, a form marked as ‘dialect’ or colloq. or even ‘substandard’ servesa useful function not found in the standard dialect. And you can certainly useit as a path to understand better the actual grammar of the whole language.

Fayetteville State University ERIC HYMAN

Fayetteville, NC 28301-4298U.S.A.e-mail: ehyman@uncfsu.edu

ERIC HYMAN

58 Morrison (see n. 54).

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