第二人称敬称的类型学考察——论汉语“您们”的可接受性

Typological Study of Second PersonHonorifics: On the Acceptability of "Ninmen"in Mandarin Chinese

人称代词是人类语言的普遍特征之一,在不同语言中人称代词所承载的功能不同。通过文献检索、访谈调查,本文考察了不同语系41种语言后发现,第二人称敬称在人类语言中呈现三种分布模式,体现了三种蕴含关系。在汉语人称代词的库藏中,第二人称复数敬称"您们"的地位一直未得到正式承认。基于BCC、CCL和人民网三大语料库,通过对"您们"用例的收集、整理和分析,揭示"您们"这一语法现象的使用现状与社会文化属性,并进一步预测汉语"您们"今后的发展走向。

Personal pronoun is one of the universal features in the inventory of human language,whereas they commonly carry various functions in different languages.In the light of the cross-linguistic investigation on fourty-one languages in different families as well as the ones in Africa and East Asia,the article indicates that the honorific form of second person displays three distribution patterns,and implies three inference relations among languages.Due to the fact that the honorific of second-person plural in Mandarin Chinese has not been accepted by any reference grammar or authoritative dictionaries in China,this paper conducts a corpus-based study and proposes that the pragmatic use of"ninmen"in the oral and written languages in Chinese has increasingly been accepted,the extensive use of the second-person plural"ninmen"is essentially determined by social and cultural properties.