Personal Pronouns YOU and WE as a Rhetorical Strategy for Enhncing Reader's Involvement in Text

Abstract

Kim, Chul-Kyu. 2007. Personal Pronouns YOU and WE as a Rhetorical Strategy for Enhancing Reader’s Involvement in Text. Textlinguistics 23. The idea of involvement in discourse has been regarded as a feature of spoken language and as relating only to speakers. However, the concept can be extended to “addressee-involvement enhancing acts” in order to explain the personal pronouns YOU and WE that the writer employs for engaging the reader in the text. Based on a corpus of 168,500 words (115 texts), the analysis shows that the two personal pronouns are almost equally importantly chosen for enhancing the reader's involvement in text. In addition, it also reveals that the two pronouns, by virtue of their inherent meaning associated with 2nd and 1st person, are manipulated by the writers to signal their attitudes towards the scientific knowledge they have, the scientific facts discussed in the text, and the readers.