Enacting Social Intimacy and Power: A Pragmatic and Critical Discourse Analysis of Archaic Pronouns in Hemingway’s Prose
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In literary stylistics, personal pronouns work as bright pragmatic levers that echo and mold both interpersonal and ideological frames. Seen through this lens, the study probes second person pronouns in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), examining their pragmatic, social, and ideological labor inside the tale. The method blends Brown and Gilman’s (1960) power and solidarity model, Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis, and James Paul Gee’s (2014) building tasks framework to follow how the push between the modern “you” and the older “thou/thee” pronouns turns into a quiet narrative tool. The results show that the hero’s changes in pronoun choice forcefully guide story motion: the plain “you” keeps professional sway in battlefield talk with figures like Anselmo and Rafael, yet the marked “thou/thee” opens space for deep emotional nearness with Maria. At the same time, these word moves tie the blunt terrors of war to wider epic themes. Finally, the study claims that fiction works as a thread of social discourse, where tiny grammatical shifts connect to social acts that build power, ideology, and human worth within conflict.
DOI: 10.30560/hssr.v9n6p1
Authors: Hua Ngọc Linh, Tran Thanh Du
Institution: Thu Dau Mot University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7225624310
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