Referring to Persons Without Using a Full-Form Reference: Locally Initial Indexicals in Action

Abstract

This article draws on naturally occurring talk-in-interaction to explore the use of unrepaired indexicals—specifically he, she, and they—to refer to third persons when there is no prior full-form reference. We show some of the local resources that participants use to understand the referent but focus predominantly on how locally initial indexicals can be used in the service of the interactional task at hand to: (a) establish continuity of focus (across sequences and across conversations) and (b) mute the relevance of a referent for the action of the turn. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the action of repair on locally initial indexical reference and show how our work contributes both to linguistic research on pronouns and to conversation analytic work on person reference.

Acknowledgments

We are most grateful to Gene H. Lerner and to three anonymous reviewers for their cogent suggestions for improving the first draft of this article. The shape of the article has changed substantially due to their careful reading and detailed and well-informed comments. Thank you also to Sue Wilkinson, who read and commented, in detail, on several drafts. We would also like to thank other members of the iRepair group—especially Victoria Land, Sue Wilkinson, and Alexa Hepburn—for their help with data collection and preliminary analysis at data sessions.

Notes

¹Space constraints preclude a discussion of how speakers disambiguate a pronoun with more than one potential antecedent, or where—as here—an inferred referent is (probably) understood despite a prior full-form reference to something else. See Corbett and Chang (1983) for experimental evidence suggesting a strong pragmatic component.

²The difficulty here seems to be that Emma's initial formulation of place—“the spot we took off” (lines 45–46)—may be heard simply as referring to the airport and thereby underspecifies the location for the action she is producing. Since anyone who flies out of the area would use the local airport, this formulation does not provide an adequate warrant for Emma's claim to a unique coincidental connection. The repair (“at that chartered place,” line 50) provides a narrower specification (see Lerner et al., 2012), thereby establishing her particular connection with Kennedy, whose body was in fact loaded onto a plane at what one newspaper described as “a remote corner of the Los Angeles International Airport” (Cooke, 1968). Emma's specification of the precise location serves to establish the coincidence, and this is then appreciated by Nancy. The crucial point, for the analysis presented here is that, although the place formulation is treated by the participants as potentially problematic, the locally initial indexicals are not. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this point.

³In Extract 5 at line 48, as in the anecdote recounted by Schegloff (1996), a locally initial indexical is used to refer to a key public figure—President John F. Kennedy in Schegloff's example, his brother Robert Kennedy in ours—in the aftermath of his assassination. However, our recorded example differs from Schegloff's anecdotal one, partly because it occurs between friends rather than strangers, partly because it occurs in the context of a “next topic” (touched off by mention of a different death, lines 13–14), partly because (as we will show) the referent of the locally subsequent “he” is already implicit in, and therefore readily inferable from, the locally prior talk, such that understanding it does not rely only on their shared knowledge as cultural members (as in Schegloff's example). One of the resources relied on throughout this episode of interaction (by both speaker and recipient) is their shared knowledge as cultural members about current events—what some linguists have called “community membership” (Greene et al., 1994). This exchange taps into, and makes apparent in the talk, the “community” of which these two conversationalists are comembers, in the manner described by Schegloff. But “community” is here established by a display of intersubjectivity that does not rely on a grasp of a locally initial indexical. Rather, by the time the locally initial indexical (“him,” line 48) is used, this shared sense of “what they are talking about” is a firmly established focus of the conversation.

⁴See also the analysis by Gundel et al. (2005), who treat a locally initial reference to “they”—a husband and wife, when only the wife has been referred to initially—as merely “a minor violation” of the Givenness Hierarchy, requiring “accommodation” from the recipient in order to ensure understanding.

⁵Compare “long-distance pronominalization,” defined as a case of pronoun use “in which the antecedent of the pronoun does not occur either in the same sentence as the pronoun or in the immediately preceding one, but further back in the text” (Hitzeman & Poesio, 1998, cited in Gerrig et al., 2011, p. 165) and “episodic anaphora,” defined as a referent that “has been displaced from the addressee's working memory at some point before the speaker utters the pronoun” (Gerrig et al., 2011, p. 165).

⁶ Heritage (2007) observes that even when a recognitional reference is used, recognition may be “inessential to the speaker's conversational project” (p. 270) such that if it is not recognized, attempts to achieve recognition can be abandoned in favor of continuing with the action underway.

⁷Notice that nearly a minute later, and after an intervening sequence disconnected from the prior (the request for consent for recording), the call-taker resumes the conversation with a locally initial indexical of her own (“they,” line 91). This reference must, in principle, index the same referents (or collection thereof) as those to whom the caller has earlier referred, since the caller has no independent access to who these people are. By using the locally indexical “they” to refer to people whose (individual or specific categorical) identities she does not in fact know, she displays that she, like the caller, is treating their identities as irrelevant at this point in the talk. The focus of attention—for both caller and call-taker—is the infection that interdicts a home birth, not the people who diagnosed it. Additionally, by ending a prior sequence (thanking the caller for agreeing to the recording) and launching a new sequence with a locally initial indexical, the call-taker is displaying that she is “doing resumption” of the topic that had been temporarily suspended—thereby establishing continuity across the intervening talk (see section on Establishing Continuity of Focus).