I just received what I feel is a perfectly typical example of this, in an email from
an administrative colleague in a central university department:
"I have cancelled the meeting for yourself and invited [another colleague]."
This wasn't an aggressive cancellation (!); it was something we'd agreed before. I've
only ever exchanged four emails with this person before, all in the last few days, so
formality and face are perhaps to the fore.
As I say, in my personal experience this feels like a typical instance of this
(new?ish?) use of 'yourself': a service encounter, between people who don't know each
other, one asking the other to do something or notify of something happening to them.
It strikes me as hyper-formal, an attempt to create an increased sense of respectful
distance - as I suggested before, a reaction to the absence of a tu/vous distinction.
I take Roger Lass' point that this would be a very long time to 'react' to such a
lack, but then plenty of innovations take a long time; case in point quotative 'be
like', reacting to the lack of an explicitly approximate quotation device.
I think a corpus analysis of professional communication could bring up some
interesting results here. It would likely have a pretty unwieldy signal-to-noise
ratio though, given that it'll always involve the same prepositions as used in the
more familiar uses of 'yourself' (e.g. 'do it for yourself'). Would that be of
interest to any of yourselves?
Dave
--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
On 8/2/2016 12:00 AM, VAR-L automatic digest system wrote:
> From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of TRUDGILL Peter
> Sent: 01 August 2016 08:54
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: VAR-L Digest - 30 Jul 2016 to 31 Jul 2016 (#2016-105)
>
> Here is a column I wrote about “myself” there years ago.
>
> The equally pervasive yourself has a different explanation, of course, along the lines Dave suggests. A few years ago I totally failed to understand what a hotel receptionist in Cardiff had said to me, even upon repetition. What she said was “Is there a telephone number for yourself at all?”. Note also the ubiquitous downtoner at all.
>
> Peter
>
>
> ___________________________________________
> Peter Trudgill FBA
> Prof. of Sociolinguistics, Agder Univ., N;
> Prof. Emeritus of Eng. Linguistics, Fribourg Univ, CH;
> Hon. Prof. of Sociolinguistics, UEA, Norwich, UK.
>
> The Eastern Daily Press publishes Peter Trudgill's language and dialect column on Mondays: http://www.edp24.co.uk/home/e-edition
>
> New book: Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language www.cambridge.org/dialectmatters<http://www.cambridge.org/dialectmatters>
>
>
>
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> Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2016 13:35:53 +0200
> From: Roger Lass <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: FW: England's Reflexive Pronoun Epidemic
>
> This was a personal response to Dave Sayers that I forgot to copy to the list.
> RL
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roger Lass [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 01 August 2016 10:53 AM
> To: 'Dave Sayers'
> Subject: RE: England's Reflexive Pronoun Epidemic
>
> If this is a 'reaction to' the lack of a T/V distinction in English, it's sure taken a long time for speakers to feel this 'lack'. The T/V distinction was never stable or regular in English, and was nearly gone in the southern quasi-standard Englishes by the end of the 17th century. The T pronoun was by then not part of ordinary usage, but pragmatically special (as it was nearly a century before in Shakespeare). Christopher Cooper, Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685) remarks (121) that 'For thou, thee & ye we say you in common speech, but emphatically, contemptuously or caressingly we say thou' [my translation]. That is, there was no regular T/V system as there is in French or German, or in some modern Yorkshire dialects, but it is rather a special purpose distinction for 'marked' situations. E.g. in Sir Walter Raleigh's trial, the lawers address him as you, but at one point in anger a prosecutor says, if I recall it right, 'Thou viper, thou liest'.
>
> I think it is problematic to claim a functional motivation for a structure that most speakers of English have got along without since the 17th c. This strikes me as 'hyperexplanation'. See the argumentation against such developments being 'functionally motivated' in my On explaining language change (CUP 1980), and Historical linguistics and language change, ch. 7 (CUP 1997). For a discussion of the Early Modern state when 'thou' was disappearing, and the kind of variation in usage that could occur, I once more suggest something of mine (sorry) the Phonology and Morphology chapter in The Cambridge History of the English Language III, sec. 3.8.2.3 (CUP 1999), which discusses and gives examples for the history of the T and V pronouns from the 15th c.
>
> RL
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dave Sayers
> Sent: 31 July 2016 07:12 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: England's Reflexive Pronoun Epidemic
>
> A bit of a classic young-people-these-days rant, going off on a growing variety of spleen-venting tangents as it proceeds...
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/opinion/english-for-yourself.html
>
> ...but I had been wondering about the increased use of 'yourself' - to my mind a reaction to the absence of a tu/vous distinction in (Standard) English.
>
> Any actual research out there about this?
>
> Your(self)s,
> Dave
>
> --
> Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132 Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
>
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