Pronoun Loss as a Form of Deflection

In the course of the history of English, the forms of the second person singular were replaced by the second person plural, both in the pronominal system (thou, thee > you) and in the agreement system (hast > have) (Lass 1999). The use of a second person plural pronoun as a singular form of address was a widespread politeness strategy in medieval Europe (Betsch 2003, Haugen 1976: 303-304, Taavitsainen & Jucker 2003, Muhlhauser & Harre 1990: 145-150). Only in English and Dutch did this politeness strategy lead to the loss of the original second person singular. In this paper I focus on the question why English and Dutch lost the second person singular pronoun whereas other European languages did not. I argue that the loss is not only socio-pragmatically motivated, but also involves a language internal factor, namely deflection. In this paper I follow Brown & Gilman (1960) in the use of the symbol T (derived from Latin tu) as a generic marker for the informal singular pronoun and the use of the symbol V (derived from Latin vos) as a generic marker for the formal pronoun. In section 2 I evaluate socio-pragmatic explanations for T-loss. Section 3 discusses the effect of the loss of second person singular marking on the verbal paradigm. Section 4 provides independent evidence for the hypothesis that avoiding uneconomic inflection plays a role in T-loss. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.