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Brown and Gilman appeal to notions of power and solidarity to account for the
use of tu and vous as pronouns of address in French. How successful is an
explanation in these terms?
1
Brown, R. & A. Gilman (1976)
Olivia Alter MT10 Dr Temple
account the fact that social relations are not just reflected in language usage, but may
actually be defined by that very usage itself.
In Pronouns of Power and Solidarity, Brown and Gilman map out a history of
French, German and Italian in terms of how these languages developed their pronominal
address system from the Latin terms tu and vos. They base their account of the
employment of different pronouns on a two-dimensional system of power and solidarity,
so that the greater the distance between two people on either dimension, the greater the
probability of V usage (where V refers to vos or, in French, vous).
Power, they explain, establishes a non-reciprocal relationship, distinguishing
between different social statuses. The distinction began as one of number, where the
Latin vos was employed as a reverential form for emperors. Heads study, comparing
pronominal reference in over a hundred languages, confirms that the pluralized form is a
basic marker of deference in many languages, not simply those which Brown and Gilman
consider to be linked2. Thus vos may have been used because there were joint rulers in
Latin antiquity, but could also be explained by the idea that an emperor represents the
people, highlighting how speakers use language as a means to indicate their social
environment. Whichever explanation holds, Brown and Gilman continue on to describe
how, by medieval times, this V form in French had extended to power structures within
the social hierarchy, and having been introduced at the top, tu then became
characterized as a lower class form, so that in the interaction of different classes, a non-
reciprocal address system was established. This asymmetric pattern, whereby upper class
speakers referred to those lower in the hierarchy as tu, and the lower classes used vous
for anyone higher than them, is therefore assumed to symbolize a power relationship, but
has also spread in modern French to any social relationship determined by factors that
could place interlocutors on a scale to signal distance, such as age (parent-child) or social
function (priest-penitent).
At the same time as this power semantic spread through the hierarchy of medieval
society, Brown and Gilman note a solidarity semantic in the symmetrical pattern of
pronominal usage. Upper classes used a reciprocal V form amongst themselves, since not
all social differences implied a difference in power, but rather, similarities regarding more
2
Head, B. E. (1978)
Olivia Alter MT10 Dr Temple
3
Eckert, P. (1981), Notes on pronominal strategies in a bilingual community, quoted in Gardner-Chloros,
P. (1991)
4
Bates, E. & L. Begnini (1975)