Repairing Self- and Recipient Reference

Abstract

There are dedicated reference terms—in English—for self- and recipient reference (I and its grammatical variants for self; you and its grammatical variants for recipient). These terms are invariant across occasions of reference and, as such, are repaired much less commonly than are references to third persons. In this article, we focus on four types of “trouble” addressed by repair to self- and recipient reference: (a) indexing the wrong referent, (b) possible referential ambiguity in direct reported speech, (c) masked scope and/or constituent membership of referent, and (d) masked relevance of referent. We also show that repairs to self- or recipient reference are routinely not limited to fixing problems of understanding but are also used in the service of the interactional task at hand.

Notes

¹See Bolden and Guimares (2012/this issue) for Russian and Brazilian Portuguese and Schegloff (2007) for Hebrew and Japanese.

² Schegloff (1996) also documents some uses of other than “I”/“you” to refer to self or recipient, including in talk to children (e.g., the father who says to his son “Leave Daddy alone”) and in dispreferred sequences (e.g., the request to a colleague phrased as “will somebody pass the paperbacks”).

³In our collection of over 200 repairs to indexicals, most of the repairs on person reference (which constitute more than two thirds of the collection) are repairs to third-person reference terms—in English, he, she, they, and suchlike.

⁴In this data extract the speaker's recipients are both the interviewee (Sarah Waters) and the overheading radio audience. For this reason, we use “addressee”—rather than recipient—when referring to the interviewee alone. In the following section, which discusses repairs in direct reported speech, we term the recipient of the direct reported speech the “addressee,” and the current interlocutor the “recipient.”

⁵A GP (an initialization of General Practitioner) is the UK term for a primary healthcare provider.

⁶Given that this is the second repair to this fragment of reported speech (the first being the correction of the teacher's gender, from “he” to “she”), the speaker may also anticipate that her recipient will have some difficulty parsing the utterance.

⁷Such usage, originally identified by Kitzinger (2005) in relation to heterosexual coupledom, appears to extend to same-sex couples (Land & Kitzinger, 2005).