Monday, October 13, 2014

grammar - Term for types of first person plural



I've noticed that there are two types of first person plural – one where the addressee is included, and one where she or he isn't. For example:



With addressee included:





  • Let us go.

  • What's our plan?

  • Where are we going?



With addressee not included:




  • We want you to come along.


  • Are you with us?



One can see that whether first person plurals we or us includes the addressee largely depends on context.
My question is this:




Is there a term for these two types of first person plurals? Are there any words in English that distinguish these two types?





If this is more appropriate for Linguistics.SE (I'm not sure) here's an additional question: Does any language distinguish between these two types of first person plurals?


Answer




Cinderella: "Hooray! We're going to the ball!"



Ugly Sister: "No, we're going to the ball. You're staying home to do the housework."




There's no single generic way to contextualise inclusive/exclusive we/us/our - in the above example, the spoken emphasis makes it clear that although Cinderella uses "we" inclusively, the Ugly Sister is definitely using it exclusively.




In other cases you might need to rely on background knowledge of what makes sense (Cameron says "We want to reduce tax rates"), or it might be implicit through other aspects of phrasing ("We will fight you all the way").



Addressing OP's specific question, the (somewhat more extensive) technical term is clusivity, but we also often refer to the inclusive (or exclusive) we.



I'll also just note that in many spoken dialects, inclusive you can include the speaker - "I like this place! They give you whatever you want!".


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