Câteva observații despre... noi. Clusivitatea în limba română

Abstract

As in (almost) all the other European languages and varieties, clusivity has no specific morphological realizations in Romanian. Even if clusivity is not a grammatical category in its own right, it is discursively and pragmatically relevant. Speakers make strategic use of the first-person plural form for expressing inclusion or exclusion of co-participants and/or third parties. Inclusive we-forms express the speaker’s involvement and are used to avoid/mitigate FTAs and to mediate direct assertions contingent on the addressee’s approval and consensus. Predicates with exclusive we are usually less mediated than those with inclusive we. Non-extended exclusive we-usages are used by speakers to narrate habitual activities that they and a close person from their family or their professional group have participated in. Extended exclusive we or extended inclusive we-forms index the speaker as a member of a group (based on his/her nationality, ethnicity, etc.). In addition, inclusive we-usages can be oriented to the interlocutor or to the 3rd party, and the speaker (= eu) can be de-emphasized and play a different role. Although these oriented inclusive we-usages are considered non-canonical, non-prototypical, or simple person inversions and (somehow) non-sensitive to clusivity, our examples prove that, on the contrary, they cannot be understood without taking into consideration clusivity (their reference is not obtained by deleting eu, it is not eu + tu, but the result of a combination between de-emphasized eu + emphasized tu). The complex mechanisms by which speakers (en)code and decode the inclusive/exclusive we-forms go beyond the scope of deixis and reference, to meet concepts such as perspective, stance, persuasion, (de)legitimisation, etc.