4 - Alternative recognitionals in person reference

Summary

When people make reference to other persons, they may make use of a range of referring expressions. As the contributions to this volume document, variations in the form of person reference may be based in general socio-cultural preferences or, within a given culture, may be based in individual or situational factors. One of the primary accounts for the use of one person reference form rather than another has been recipient design (Sacks and Schegloff 1979). For instance, compare the use of a name (e.g., ‘Bill’) to a description (e.g., ‘this guy’). The former conveys that the speaker assumes the recipient would be able to recognize the person by name whereas the latter conveys that the speaker assumes the recipient would not know the referent. Alternatively, the use of a name rather than a particular role description (e.g., ‘the girl that always sits next to you in the staff meetings’) treats the recipient as being able to recognize the person and the selection of referring expression concerns how best to actually achieve recognition (see Sidnell, this volume, for cases where reference forms are treated as not well fitted to the recipient).

In this chapter, I argue that the use of one referring expression over another is not only about underlying linguistic or cultural preferences nor is it entirely accounted for in terms of the achievement of recognition.