Who is you? Identifying 'you' in second-person narratives: A systemic functional linguistics analysis.

摘要

In narratives, characters are introduced to readers through the use of textual clues left by the author. These clues, in the form of pronouns, enable the reader to follow the various characters involved throughout the story. Pronouns have no lexical content and are used as referential devices, guiding the reader through the story helping them to recover the identity of the characters. However, some narratives employ a literary technique in which the story's protagonist is introduced by the pronoun `you' with no previous textual information given. As a result the pronoun `you' is assumed to be exophoric, pointing outside the text to the reader. Through the analysis of second-person short stories and novels this paper will demonstrate how lexico-grammatical and discourse semantic features contribute to the interpretation of the pronoun 'you' in second-person narratives functioning as either an exophoric or an endophoric expression.