Generic ''you''

In English grammar and in particular in casual English, generic you, impersonal you, or indefinite you is the use of the pronoun you to refer to an unspecified person, as opposed to its use as the second person pronoun.

In English

The generic you is primarily a colloquial substitute for one.[1][2] For instance,

"Brushing one's teeth is healthy."

can be expressed less formally as

"Brushing your teeth is healthy."

Generic pronouns in other languages

In German, the informal second-person singular personal pronoun du (you) is sometimes used in the same sense as the indefinite pronoun man (one). The equivalent informal second-person singular personal pronoun in Dutch je is similarly used, as is the equivalent pronoun in Russian.

The second-person pronoun sinä is often used in Finnish to replace passive, largely due to the influence of generic you in English, but this is only recommended to be done in spoken or otherwise informal language.[3]

In Darija (Arabic as spoken in the Maghreb), there are two distinct singular second-person pronouns, one masculine (used when addressing a man) and one feminine (used when addressing a woman); but when used as generic pronouns, the speaker uses the pronoun with the gender corresponding to their own gender, rather than that of the person they are addressing.[4]

In Japanese, the sentence structure may be adjusted to make the patient of an action, or even the action itself, the topic of a sentence, thus avoiding the use of a pronoun altogether.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 1467. ISBN 0-521-43146-8.
  2. ↑ Quirk, Randolph; Greenbaum, Sidney; Leech, Geoffrey; Svartvik, Jan (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman. p. 354. ISBN 978-0-582-51734-9.
  3. ↑ "Kielitoimisto".
  4. ↑ Souag, Lameen. Jabal al-Lughat: Impersonal vs. personal "you". Blog entry, posted 2007 September 9; accessed 2007 October 2.

Further reading

  • Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (E. Ward Gilman, ed.) Merriam-Webster, 1993. ISBN 0-87779-132-5
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