Second-Person Pronouns (or Pronoun Phrases)

We're used to the second-person pronoun being "you" (both singular and plural); in archaic works, we see "thou/thee," and I'm told some Quakers still use "thee" in both the nominative and the accusative. "Y'all" sometimes makes an appearance.

But there are some second-person pronoun phrases as well. "Your majesty," "your highness," and the like are examples, though note that they take third-person singular verbs: "If your majesty wishes …" rather than "If your majesty wish …."

This brings me to the legalese second-person pronouns. You're likely already thinking here about "your honor"; but there's also another such pronoun phrase: "this court." If you're filing a brief in (say) the Ninth Circuit, you generally wouldn't say "In X v. Y, the Ninth Circuit held …," just as if you're e-mailing me, you generally wouldn't say "In this post, Eugene Volokh claimed." Just as you'd use "you" in writing to me, you'd use "this Court" in writing to the court about itself:

In X v. Y, this Court held ….

We don't think about it, but that's a second-person pronoun phrase. Or pronominal phrase, if you want to be geekier still.

Comments

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

Two generations or so ago, Pittsburghers had a local plural second-person pronoun, analogous to the southerners' "y'all". The word was "yinz" (or "yins"). Maybe the legal profession should revive, and formalize, "yinz".

[Eric VonSalzen]

My wife's family were Pittsburghers, and I heard it as "younce" or "yunz". We live in Dixie now, so y'all is standard.

[Gasman]

When is a second person pronoun a first person pronoun.
I find it peculiar when people recounting personal experience, a decidedly first person perspective, using second person pronouns.
This interview of a person with persistent symptoms following Covid infection illustrates this phenomenon. The word you is within quotations of a patient recounting their personal, quite first person, experience. In each of the 7 uses of you, the word you refers to the speaker herself.
Strangely though, substituting I as a pronoun seems to violate how colloquial speech should sound.

Any linguists have an explanation for this phenomenon, wherein you becomes a first person pronoun?

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

"You" in that context often means the same as "one". As in: "The theory of relativity says you can only travel at speeds slower than the speed of light." The response "Well, maybe we can hire someone who can travel faster than the speed of light, and have him deliver our messages, instead of me, since my speed is limited that way" is not appropriate, because "you" means "one" here, not literally "you". So "You" is actually an indefinite pronoun in this type of pronouncement, not a first- or second- person pronoun.

"You", used this way, can make a description more vivid and striking, by inviting the listener to picture himself in the same situation. That's what's going on in the interview with the COVID patient:, "you're just afraid every night ..." is more engaging and more inclusive of the listener than the literal "I'm just afraid every night..." or the explicit "Everyone who experiences what I'm experiencing will be afraid every night...".

You can't always understand ordinary speech correctly with the kind of strict grammatical analysis you are tempted to apply, you know.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

That's easy for you to say.

[Eric VonSalzen]

In German, "man" doesn't mean a male person, that's "Mann"; it means what we mean in English when we say "one": "man spracht", one says.

[Don Nico]

Eric,
Wie übersitzt man "wokespeak" auf Deutsch?

[Dr. Ed 2]

The third person is often used to appear to be objective, e.g. "this office" rather than "I" in a letter to a student.

[ReaderY]

Professor Volokh,

Let’s ask a basic question. Would you regard a reference to a business corporation as a 2nd person pronoun? If you were talking to Jeff Bezos and said “Amazon,” would you regard Amazon as simply a fancy way of referring to him?

My guess would be not. The reason is you are acculturated to thinking of business corporations as actually being entities separate from their principals, as having an actual separate existance.

Now monarchs, offices, and courts are traditionally corporate entitites much like business corporation. The English legal term is corporation sole (except a court, which is often a corporation aggregate.) But the concept behind these older, more traditional kinds of corporation is similar to a business corporation. The office has an enduring existence and identity separate from and independent of the office-holder. And the respect implied by the use of an honorific is the respect given the office, not necessarily the office-holder.

A court is probably a particularly good example. Traditionally a court is not just a collection of individual judges, the mere sum of its parts. Rather, it is an independent entity with its own will and action, much as a business corporation is an independent entity separate from its principals.

I think that your post here says something profound about the state of our society. You’re not just uncomfortable with the idea of talking to an office-holder as an institution rather than as a person. You think that institutional identity doesn’t exist to the point that you regard an institutional form of address as being a GRAMMATICAL alter ego for the individual office-holder. That I think says something profound about the erosion of traditional instinctive respect for institutions.

You make an exception for business corporations. You have no respect for any kind of other traditional public institution, you regard them as being actual things. Yet when it comes to businesses, this traditional instinctive respect survives. You imstinctively treat the honorific terms business people clothe themselves with as having actual reality that you don’t accord to holders of traditional public offices and institutions. You would never regard a reference to Amazon as just another way of referring to Jeff Bezos. Yet you regard “Your Majesty” as just another way of referring to Elizabeth Windsor and “this court” as just another way of referring to the individual judges.

I doubt you’re alone in this. And that says something profound about changes in respect for institutions in our society, which institutions are accorded respect in our society and which aren’t, which institutions’ separate existence is treated as something real and which isn’t.

We are truly becoming a nation of men, not laws. The laws are regarded as nothing more than cloaks for the men, not having imdependent existence. The only things regarded as having independent reality are rich peoples’ sources of riches. That, and nothing else, is regarded as real and worthy of our respect. It’s the only kind of corporate existence that seems to have survived in the culture’s consciousness.

[Intelligent Mr Toad]

In one of the Asterix books (I forget which one), someone (I forget who) is preparing to discuss something (I forget what) with Julius Caesar. His (the character whose name I've forgotten) advisor warns him that Julius Caesar has taken to referring to himself using the third person. So they guy goes in to Caesar's chambers, salutes awkwardly, and says "He's great!" Caesar, suspiciously, asks "Who? Who's great?" The guy replies "errrr... you!" and Caesar answers "Oh, him!"

[Noscitur a sociis]

Is that really correct? Many judges will typically refer to themselves as "the Court" or "it" (e.g. instead of "I reject the defendants' arguments and I therefore deny their motion to dismiss" they would write "The Court rejects the defendants' arguments and it therefore denies their motion to dismiss"). Would you say "the Court" is a first-person pronoun phrase? What about "it"?

[Don Nico]

NaS,
It seems that in that case the judge is speaking not as an individual but as the spokesman for and institutional entity. In that case the judge is appropriately using a third person form.

[Noscitur a sociis]

How is that any different from the "second person" usage described in the post?

[Stephen from Northumberland]

I take issue (or in these days should I be deeply offended- sic) with "thee" being described as archaic. Growing up in 1960s Yorkshire we used "thee" all the time. An example is "I'll see thee o'er yonder" - southern English translation is "I'll see you over there".

Still trying to recover from the post a few months ago where the "v" in cases such as "A v B" is incorrectly pronounced "versus" instead of "and".

Before anyone takes umbrage, it's just a gentle tweak at those across the sea.

[Lakanal 2]

¨Held¨in ¨This Court held¨ is grammatically in the third person. In the present, it would be "this Court holds".

"Can" in "You can only travel at speeds..." is grammatically a second-person form, though indeed it connotes the indefinite. But you grammatically requires the second person verb. "You need a ticket to use the train"; "One needs a ticket to use the train".

[DavidTaylor]

I'm not sure I follow your use here. "Held" is the past tense form in the first, second, and third person:

I held the glass.
You held the glass.
He/She/It held the glass.

Similarly, "can" is the form for first, second, and third person use, not just for a "second-person" use:

I can only travel at speeds...
You can only travel at speeds....
He/She/It can only travel at speeds....

English has very few "second person forms" that differ from first or third person forms, and then usually only with the /s suffix for the third person:

I hold the ball.
You hold the ball.
He holds the ball.

[Michael 11]

But "this Court" cannot be a pronominal phrase, because it is not pronominal. It's just an ordinary noun phrase. Similarly, in languages such as Japanese in which people may frequently refer to themselves and their interlocutors by name, we don't say that "Taro" is a first-person pronoun in "will mother buy Taro a piece of candy?", or that it is a second-person pronoun in "mother will buy Taro a piece of candy". It's not a pronoun; it's a noun.

[Hugo S. Cunningham]

In diplomatic reporting of the early 1900s (before national self-determination and decolonization created a swarm of new addresses), it was common to refer to countries, especially great powers, by the addresses of their foreign ministries, eg: Whitehall, Quai d'Orsay, Wilhelmstrasse, Ballhausplatz, Sublime Porte, Itamaraty, Foggy Bottom, etc.