3.2 Non-canonical Uses of Personal Pronouns…
3.2.4 First Person Plural Pronoun: Women ‘We’
3.2.4.1 Vague Use
The vague use refers to a group of specific yet unidentified participants in the discourse context. The vague women includes the speaker as well as the
non-identifiable participants in discourse. The inclusion of addressee(s) or of a third party is unable to be determined by the context. The instances from the two genres are given below.
Daily conversations
In the following example, the three speakers L, C, and J discussed the insufficient fund in the construction of another building. The speaker J uses vague first person plural to include the addressees in the event he describes.
(3.22) L: 所以 你 根本 都 要 做 長期 的
Suoyi ni genben dou yao zuo changqi de So 2s basically all want do long-term NOM 考慮。
68 all have pass-by attitude right-not-right just count be
貴 了， 然後 我們 建 了，
J: ‘Including ourselves, (we) don’t plan to stay long, right? Even if it is expensive, and we build it, or we choose to live in it.’
In his first use of the women ‘we’, the speaker J argues that we all have improper attitude and are inclined to engage the hearers/addressees in the discussed event.
Besides, his intention of inviting hearers’ involvement is shown in the successive occurrence of women. Besides, the speaker tries to seek agreement from the addressees by proposing a tag question, dui bu dui ‘am I right’. Furthermore, it is observed that the use of vague women can be considered to be the shift of focus from the self to a group of people. The next example clearly shows this function. The student, S tells the teacher, T that his classmates are used to taking the board hung outside the classroom as the hoop and try to touch it as if it were a real hoop in basketball courts.
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T: ‘Have your teacher corrected your behavior at once?’
S: ‘We take that board as the hoop.’
The speaker B includes other unspecified classmates who also participate in the
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misbehavior by the other-inclusive vague women. The inclusion of others implies the speaker’s intention to escape from taking the responsibility of the negative act alone.
Hence, it is argued that the vague women cannot simply be used as a device to seek agreement and to invite the addressees’ participation but to avoid taking full responsibility as well.
TV interviews
As in daily conversation, the speakers employ the vague women in speech to relieve from duty, to seek agreement and to invite participation. In (3.24), the journalist J, expresses his opinions toward the policy of raising the electricity price.
(3.24) J: …. 其實 今天 的 問題， 已經 不 是 J: ‘….Actually, the problem has gone beyond the issue of economics. The
public policy is ruined. I expect to see the politicians taking responsibility toward the policy they made. I do not ask anyone to quit.
At least, (you) can confess (yourself) to us, the general public that you have messed up the policy. It is not a matter of expectation now. It’s never going to be the same.’
The speaker uses deictic wo (underlined) two times to state his opinions toward the current policy, and then he switches to the vague women—which suggests the
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speaker’s intention of eliminating the distance from the laobaixing ‘general public’. It should be noted that the sentence is acceptable and grammatical without the use of vague women. However, if the speaker simply uses laobaixing ‘general public’, he would be like pointing bluntly to the third party as if he was not one of them. The vague women creates a sense of involvement and displays the speaker’s intention to shorten the distance between himself and the addressee/third party he mentions.
Moreover, when women occurs next to the noun comprising a great number of people, the speaker implies that the described event is shared by and related to this group of people; and thus he could stress the importance of the event and call the hearers’
attention. The reference scope of the women has extended from the small group of the present addressees and the audiences to a large group of people, like general public.
Therefore, the vague women can call the addressees’ attention to the discussed event.
Li (1981: 16) proposes that plural personal pronouns would co-occur with
‘words referring to something which denotes a congregate of people’, such as family, country, society or school (see also Lin, 1993). The examples in the current study, i.e.
women minzhong ‘we general public’, women quanti hui-yuan ‘we all members’, and women laobaixing ‘we general public’ support their observation. Aside from the
collocation with people or institution, the vague women can also co-occur with an inanimate noun phrase. The example (3.25) is given for illustration, where the legislator, L uses a chart to illustrate the unbalanced tax revenue.(3.25) L: 因為 我們 要 這樣 講 啦， 我們 comfort fund that-is solider public-servant teacher
還有 國民 年金 啦。這 三 個 設計， 你
haiyou guomin nianjin la zhe san ge sheji ni and national annuity PRT this three CL design 2s
現在 看看。 那個 勞 保， 照
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L: ‘We would say it in this way. Our government’s entire funds, including the Farmers’ Insurance and the one for the public servants, will go bankrupted.
You see, the retirement fund for our Labor Insurance and for the public servants, and also the National Pension, these three systems; you can see it now. The Labor Insurance—s/he needs to pay 23.84 dollars to strike a receive retirement fund of the Labor Insurance. The second candidate referents would be the government since the insurance system is under its rule. However, unlike the case in women guojia ‘our country’, and women laobaixing ‘our people’, the speaker, a journalist, is not a member of the possible referent list, so the first person plural could be used to attract and retrieve the addressees’ attention to the following utterances. As the speaker uses nikankan ‘you see’ to indicate the switch of the focus to a next relevant topic, the vague women is used with an interpersonal function, involving the hearers in the discussed event. The use of women mainly for the involvement of others is also found in the other speech genre. The example from daily conversation is presented below for illustration. In (3.26), the speaker C in charge of the general affair in a church mentions that the statistics support the construction of another building but there is no sufficient fund for it.
(3.26) C: 但 這種 數據 是 因為 < 人 的 調查 >，
73 statistics analysis. You know. Right? We (have shown) the statistics and it is pretty clear that these statistics indicate the tendency. Right?’
(Daily conversations) The adjacent position of the rhetorical question, dui bu dui ‘right’ and the women ‘we’
imply speakers’ intention to invite and involve hearers to illustrate the event, in this case, shuju ‘statistics’ (underlined)—the speaker’s main focus in his utterances. As a result, this may suggest that the use of the first person plural performs the three functions, seeking agreement, relieving speakers’ responsibility, and most importantly, creating a sense of involvement between speech participants.
Besides, it could be found in the mismatched use of personal pronoun and the intended referents could involve others for support and also relieve the speaker of full responsibility of his remark as in (3.27). The topic is related to the spokesperson of
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Wo juede women zheyang jiang ye bushi gere 1s think 1pl this-way say also not personal 喜好， 但是 就是 就事論事。
xihao danshi jiushi jiushilunshi
preference but just confine-the-discussion-to-the subject
胡又偉 跟 鄭麗文 比， 鄭麗文
huyouwei gen zhengliwen bi zhengliwen Hu-You-Wei with Zheng-Li-Wen compare Zheng-Li-Wen
就 絕對 做 得 比 胡又偉 好 多。
jiu juedui zuo de bi huyouwei hao duo just definitely do CSC compare Hu-You-Wei good many J: ‘Brother Hong Yi has got to the point. What personality can make it
work better?’
H: ‘(T2 Right T2)’
G: ‘I don’t think it is the personal preferences. We confine the discussion to the matter at issue. Compared to Hu-You-Wei, Zhe-Li-Wun
definitely does much better than him.’