ABSTRACT
When social actors communicate with others, they normally try to solicit their interlocutors’ agreement, to get them to think in a certain way and to adopt a certain point of view. To ensure success, speakers use certain devices to present the content of their utterance from a specific perspective that may influence the hearer’s thoughts and attitude. Such devices may include a special tone of voice, a certain posture, or, importantly for our purposes, a particular linguistic element. One linguistic element that is available for speakers of Levantine Arabic is an optional you in the form a dative pronoun. Speakers employ an optional you in order to anchor the content of their utterance, along with their evaluation of it, to their hearer and to invoke a shared identity with her or him in an attempt to get her or him to take the same stance and to recruit her or his assent. This paper presents attested evidence of optional you to illustrate how it functions as an invoker of shared identity. The paper also puts forth a sociocognitive model that draws on Cognitive Grammar and stancetaking theory to account for this function.
