The Pragmatic Dimension of Personal Pronouns

Abstract

This study explores the pragmatic dimension of personal pronouns in Azerbaijani and English, focusing on how these linguistic units encode social status, politeness, inclusion, and speaker identity. Traditionally considered mere grammatical markers, pronouns are shown here to be crucial indicators of social relationships and communicative intent. Drawing on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), the research analyzes how pronoun choice affects illocutionary and perlocutionary acts within discourse. Comparative examples from the Azerbaijani National Corpus and the British National Corpus illustrate that Azerbaijani explicitly encodes respect and social distance through morphological distinctions such as sən (informal “you”) and siz (formal “you”), while English relies on syntactic and lexical politeness strategies. The study further discusses the inclusive and exclusive uses of biz (“we”) in Azerbaijani, highlighting how speakers use pronouns to manage in-group and out-group relations. Findings reveal that while English achieves pragmatic variation indirectly through modal expressions and context, Azerbaijani does so directly through its pronominal system. This demonstrates that personal pronouns function as powerful pragmatic tools reflecting cultural values, politeness norms, and communicative strategies. The article contributes to the broader understanding of linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and intercultural communication.