Grammaticalisation in social context: The emergence of a new English pronoun[Note 1. Many thanks to Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill and Eivind ...]

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.