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You-Attitude: A Linguistic Perspective

The University of British Columbia, Vancouver

You-attitude is a pedagogically convenient cover term that subsumes considerable complexity, both with respect to the text effects it may include and the text charac teristics that create these effects. Some of the insights on politeness, tact, and def erence found in the work of Brown and Levinson, Leech, and Fraser and Nolen can help provide guidelines for assessing how important a you-attitude may be in writing about a particular real-world situation, and case grammar and information structure can inform strategies to enhance the expression of a you-attitude. Rather than being a binary variable, you-attitude appears to be gradable, and an infor mal student assessment of the you-attitude expressed in ten versions of the same passage suggests that the various strategies for enhancing the you-attitude conveyed by a text appear to have a cumulative effect, so that a greater sense of you-attitude is created when more strategies are used.

Key Words: You-attitude • linguistics • politeness • case grammar • information structure

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