Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun

The paper documents the early stages of grammaticalisation of a new first person singular pronoun, man, used in multi-ethnic adolescent peer groups in inner cities of the U.K. I argue that the pronoun derives from a plural noun man, which is used in the peer groups to refer to a group of individuals whose precise composition is defined by the linguistic or situational context. The recruitment of man as a pronoun is encouraged by the frequent use of its homonym as a pragmatic marker and address form in the peer groups, and by the locally salient connotations of some uses of the singular noun man. The functions of the plural noun and the pragmatic marker are reflected in the two main rhetorical functions of the new pronoun: adolescent speakers use the man pronoun to position themselves as members of a contextually defined group and thereby provide authority for their opinions or mitigate a potentially face-threatening act, and they also use it to solicit empathy from their interlocutor or construct solidarity. I suggest that a compositional model of the semantics of pronouns can account for the emergence of the new pronoun.