Abstract
The way we refer to third parties in talk is one means through which relationships between speaker, recipients and referents are made relevant. A range of referring expressions is available and any number of expressions might correctly refer to a referent. One guide to selection is the preference for achieving recognition and the default practice is, where possible, to use a name. This conversation analytic article describes a practice that does not fit the default pattern. In this practice, speakers select a broad social category (typically gendered, e.g. guy, woman, but not always, e.g. people) when a recognitional form could (and perhaps, ought to) have been used. Despite the designed selection of a categorical form, the referent(s) remains recognitional. For example, in one extract, a mother in conversation with her teenage daughter refers to a collective made up of her former husband and his girlfriend as ‘these people’. The daughter has no difficulty working out who ‘these people’ are and recognizes it as a reference to her father and stepmother. I show that this designedly categorical formulation often contributes to hostile action by distancing the referent(s) from parties to the interaction – making the referent(s) unnameable and not connected to the speaker and recipient. The role of demonstrative pronouns – this, that, these – are discussed in relation to constructing social distance between speakers, recipients and referents.
Keywords
In April 2010, the then British Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sparked a media furore that was disastrous for his election campaign. Having been publicly challenged by a Labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, on economic matters, he was later heard to comment that he should never have been ‘put with that woman’ because she was ‘just . . . bigoted’. 1 Interestingly, and of relevance here, when interviewed later, Duffy reported that she was more offended by being referred to as ‘that woman’ than she had been by the description of her as bigoted (Mail Online, 2010). She reports feeling dismissed by the ‘that woman’ reference, or in her words, ‘as if I am to be brushed away’.
Brown’s selection of ‘that woman’ is reminiscent of US President Clinton’s assertion, made at the end of a White House press conference in January 1998, that he had ‘not had sexual relations with that woman’. 2 Here, ‘that woman’ is a reference to Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, with whom Clinton was charged with having an affair. This now famous denial is memorable not only for its disingenuousness, but for the apparently dismissive terms in which Clinton refers to Lewinsky; ‘that woman’ is a remarkable reference to a former lover (see Atkinson, 1999: 581). 3
Duffy and Lewinsky are, of course, women and to refer to them as such might appear benign, especially relative to more obviously hostile descriptions (e.g. bigoted in Duffy’s case, or stalker in Lewinsky’s). 4 What is it, then, about the reference ‘that woman’ that is (potentially) objectionable? One possibility is that it designedly does not name the referent, in circumstances in which they could have been named. Certainly, in the case of Lewinsky, Clinton could have selected her name. 5 Indeed, Clinton follows ‘that woman’ with a second reference: ‘Ms Lewinsky.’ 6 Why, then, not name her in the first place? Sacks and Schegloff (1979) show that when referring to a third party, selection of a name where a name can be used (i.e. where a speaker and/or recipient know (about) the referent) is typical in interaction. Not using a name where it is possible to use one is, therefore, hearable as doing something other than mere referring, and recipients can inspect the talk for the kind of ‘other’ social action that is being constituted (Schegloff, 1996). Further, putting aside for the moment the indexical (that), ‘woman’ belongs to the broad social category ‘gender’ which is what Sacks (1972a, 1972b) calls a pn-adequate category. That is, gender is a category that is (arguably) population member-exhaustive, in that all humans putatively belong to a gendered category, without remainder. 7 In referring to persons, the pronominalized gender category (or the more generic plural, people) tends to be used when speakers and/or recipients cannot name a referent, either because they do not themselves know the referent, or because they anticipate that the recipient will not know them. 8 However, in selecting the categorical form, it is unlikely that Clinton expected his recipients not to recognize the referent, and here we should reinstate the indexical ‘that’. As Auer (1984) observes, the deictic [that] +[reference] indicates to recipients that they are expected to recognize the referent. ‘That woman’ is therefore recognitional, despite the potential for ambiguity, given the size of the population of the category woman. It is not that Clinton could not name the referent; instead, he selected a form that does not name her – a display of unwillingness as opposed to inability.
This article examines uses of broad categorical reference formulations – typically gendered, for example, woman, guy, or even the even more generic and plural, people – selected as alternatives to analysably available default recognitional formulations. 9 I will also address questions of indexicality that arise with use of deictic this/that, which regularly preface these categorical references. First, a brief overview of the conversation analytic literature on practices for referring to third persons.
Referring to third persons
Sacks and Schegloff (1979) argue that person reference is a systematic domain of talk, with its own preference structure. Two preferences in particular frame the selection of a referring term. First, there is a preference for achieving recognition, central to establishing intersubjectivity (Heritage, 2002). Second, there is a preference for minimization, employing single rather than multiple references to the same person. 10 In English, both preferences are met if a referent can be, and is, named. In cases where achieving recognition is doubtful with a single reference, the preference for minimization is relaxed. That is, recognition takes priority.
Proper names are the major referring expression for referring to third persons. 11 If speakers and/or recipients do not know a person’s name, then recognitional descriptions (e.g. the woman with the red hair) can be used to invoke the referent in the terms speakers figure will be recognizable to recipients. As Stivers et al. (2007) point out, descriptors risk going beyond simply referring to an individual by pragmatically displaying a stance towards the referent (consider the one with the big ears as opposed to Charles). Names are comparatively ‘safe’ options. If recognition is not (thought to be) possible, non-recognitional expressions are available that convey to recipients they do not (need to) know the referent (e.g. this woman, some bloke, someone).
Schegloff (1996) subsequently expanded the analytical domain of person reference by distinguishing between locally initial and subsequent positions (i.e. first and subsequent mention of a referent in a sequence of talk), and locally initial and subsequent forms (i.e. the kinds of expressions typically used for initial and subsequent mentions). In referring to third parties, the preferred practice for initial reference is a recognitional formulation (e.g. a name), and in subsequent references using the relevant pronoun (e.g. she, he). 12
These distinctions lead Schegloff (1996) to consider person reference as a resource for performing social action. He poses the question of how it is that speakers show that they are merely referring to a referent as opposed to doing some extra pragmatic work. The pragmatic work of a referring expression relies on tacit understanding of practices-as-usual (see Enfield, 2007). If references appear in the typical format in the typical position, and are fitted to the preferences for recognition and minimization, they are treated as simply referring to someone; examples of what Schegloff (1996: 439) calls reference simpliciter.
Illustrating one kind of action constituted using non-default referring terms, Stivers (2007) reports an analysis of what she calls alternative recognitionals. These are a form of third party reference that departs from the unmarked default practice insofar as speakers use a categorical term (e.g. your sister) as an alternative to the default form (e.g. Aunt Alene), when that default form would be entirely usable. Importantly, the marked reference still achieves recognition by the recipient. In line with Schegloff’s (1996) proposal about the function of marked person references, Stivers shows that when speakers use alternative recognitionals, they are doing more than simply referring. She argues that these references shift the ‘domains of responsibility’ in the triangular relationship between speaker, recipient and referent by highlighting a specific and salient facet of the referent’s identity (see Stivers, 2007: 94–97). In the your sister example, the speaker means to draw attention to the sibling relationship between the recipient (the speaker’s mother) and the referent (the speaker’s aunt) in a way that the referent’s name would not do (Stivers, 2007: 74). The precise alternative recognitional is better fitted to the action underway than the default form.
The practice of person reference described in this article has resonances with Stivers’s concept of alternative recognitionals in that speakers use a categorically marked formulation when the default form is known and known-to-be-known by parties to the interaction, but done in such a way that the referent remains recognizable to the recipient. However, my collection differs from Stivers’s in three ways. First, there is a larger categorical shift in the marked form – in essence, the shift from a nameable person to member of the pn-adequate category gender (or, even more generically, people). Second, the instances in my collection are prefaced with the demonstratives this or that (or the plural these).13,14 Third, Stivers focused on locally initial references whereas my collection includes both initial and subsequent mentionings – examples that are marked not just for formulation but, regularly, for positioning as well. In the next section, I show an example each of a that-prefaced reference, this-prefaced and ‘these-prefaced’, showing in each case that the referent could (and ought to) have been named but how the selected formulation contributes to the action underway.
That guy, this girl, these people
The target references in my collection consist of gendered categorical formulations (or a higher level category such as people), selected as an alternative to unmarked default reference, and prefaced with a demonstrative pronoun: that, this or these. There follows illustrative analysis of each of these: a case in which a husband/father is referred to as that guy, one where a mutual acquaintance is referred to as this girl and one in which a father and stepmother are referred to as these people.
In the first of these examples, taken from Sacks (1992, II: 499), the target reference occurs at line 5 when the speaker refers to his father (or more accurately given that he is animating his mother’s words, his mother’s husband) as ‘that guy’.
Extract 1 [
In this extract, Bob is complaining about Christmas being ‘damn painful’ (line 1), and as an illustration of the holiday’s challenges, he cites the widespread difficulty of having to express gratitude for unwanted gifts and provides a specific example through the reported speech of his mother, as if uttered to Bob – ‘shit, when’s that guy gonna learn that I don’t like want an electric skillet . . .’ (lines 4–5).
In his analysis of this extract, Sacks (1992) notices that the speaker could have used a recognitional kin term, as in ‘when is your dad gonna learn . . .’, or a name, as in ‘when is Bill gonna learn . . .’, or some pejorative term, fitted to the complaint against him, such as ‘when is that dope gonna learn . . .’. On its own, ‘guy’ is a prototypical non-recognitional formulation. It is a categorical reference that describes the referent in minimal terms; the sort of term generally used to refer to a person whom the recipient does not know/would not recognize. In this case, the initial recipient of the reported utterance that includes the person reference ‘that guy’ is Bob, the referent’s son, and ‘guy’ is therefore a striking way to refer to someone who is known and known-to-be-known through shared kinship with parties to the (reported) interaction. The reference manipulates the social distance between speaker, recipient and referent by detaching the referent from the known connections between them. In Sacks’s words:
‘That guy’ is ‘a reference to someone who, its use suggests, is relatively distant from the parties involved . . . in using the term you indicate at least that sort of distance between speaker and the person, or recipient and the person. ‘Just a guy I know’, ‘Some guy whose name I forgot’ as compared to ‘Bill’. Now, plainly the person involved is not such a person. He’s not distantly related, or distantly unrelated . . . And plainly, a way of producing a hostile reference to someone is to increase the apparent distance via the use of a reference to them beyond the actual known distance. (Sacks, 1992, II: 502)
The current recipients are Bob’s interlocutors, and it is conceivable that they do not know the referent indicated by ‘that guy’. However, the referent is identifiable to Bob’s interlocutors; they have no trouble working out who ‘that guy’ is and indeed, the same person earlier referred to as ‘that guy’ is referred to by another participant as ‘his father’ (line 10), showing that she correctly heard ‘that guy’ as a reference to Bob’s father in the first place.
The achievement of recognition in this extract is, in a sense, remarkable. The locally initial reference to Bob’s father is ‘that guy’. The use of the demonstrative ‘that’ displays the speaker’s assumption that recipients will know which particular guy is being referred to. A referring expression prefaced with ‘that’ proposes recognitionality (Auer, 1984; Sacks, 1992). However, when ‘that’ prefaces a broad category like ‘guy’, the speaker does not offer much in the way of clues to identify the person. ‘That guy’ is a semantically inadequate reference because it relies on the interactional context to accomplish recognition (see Levinson, 2004). In Extract 1, the recipients have to infer who the target referent is from other details; for example, the fact that the reference appears as part of a complaint about unwanted presents (originally) uttered by Bob’s mother about a person who ought have known better about what to give her. This potentially represents much inferential work, work that could have been saved if Bob (or his mother) had named the referent. However, plain naming is less fitted to the complaint against him; that he acts as if he does not know his own wife. ‘That guy’ neatly places him at the sort of social distance his impersonal gifts embody, and is better fitted to the action underway – here complaining.
In the next example, the target reference ‘this girl’ is a reference to Miss Cooper, someone assisting in selling a flat for her friend (who is abroad). Miss Cooper is reported as having been ‘nothing but a damn nuisance’ to the caller, Fiona, and her recipient, Harold. Fiona has called Harold to give him the good news that the flat he is trying to purchase is being taken off the estate agent’s books and is proceeding as a private matter and that therefore they can ‘forget about Miss Cooper’. Here then, Miss Cooper is a third party referent, known to the parties to the interaction and named in unproblematic (if formal) terms early in the call (a few lines from the beginning of the call are included to demonstrate this is the case). At line 4, Fiona refers to the same referent, earlier referred to as Miss Cooper, but now using the categorical form, ‘this girl’.
Extract 2
Note that Fiona does not complete her turn at line 4, but this disruption to the progressivity of talk is not connected to the person reference, as evidenced by the production of a locally subsequent ‘she’ at line 5. That is, having introduced what is a locally initial ‘this girl’ (line 4) in an incomplete turn, there is no repair-initiation on the person reference in the restart at line 5 and the referent is taken as having already been introduced. 15 The recipient, Harold, displays no trouble in working out who was meant by ‘this girl’ (and the subsequent ‘she’), simply receipting Fiona’s analysis of the situation with ‘Right’ at line 10.
Again, ‘this girl’ is the kind of reference used when speakers and/or recipients do not know the referent. That is, it is a prototypical non-recognitional formulation. Of course, Fiona and Harold can and do name Miss Cooper earlier in the call, and so the selection is not connected to the obscurity of the referent. Drawing on Stivers (2007), we can guess at the various (complaint relevant) alternative recognitionals open to Fiona: ‘that interferer’, ‘the friend’, ‘Miss know-it-all’. Instead, the non-recognitional form (not action, because the referent remains recognitional) is better fitted to the action underway; a dismissal of Miss Cooper as one of the central figures involved in the proposed purchase. With ‘this girl’ Fiona dismantles the terms in which Miss Cooper relevantly features in the selling of the flat; Miss Cooper is rendered so insignificant that she can be forgotten about.
In the next extract, which comes from a telephone call between 17-year-old Penny and her mother, the target reference shifts two known, nameable persons to the broadest and most general category of persons – ‘people’. Penny’s parents are divorced and she has called her mother to complain about the treatment she and her boyfriend received on a recent visit to her father, whom she calls ‘Dad’, and his partner, whom she calls by her first name, ‘Mandy’. The first mention of each of the referents are included in the unnumbered, single-spaced lines at the beginning of the extract. The focal reference occurs at line 20 when Mum asks ‘Why do these people’s opinions matter?’, where ‘these people’ are Penny’s father and stepmother; a noticeably marked way for a woman to refer to a collectivity composed of her former husband, the father of her children, and his girlfriend.
Extract 3 [CTS29]
The target turn is Mum’s three-part turn (lines 19–20), which begins with her acknowledgment of Penny’s comparative assessments of herself and her stepmother (lines 9–18). Penny has deliberated on events and concluded that she is a ‘better quality human being’ than Mandy and that at ‘not even eighteen yet’ she has more ‘emotional maturity’ than her 40-year-old stepmother. Mum acknowledges this and then uses the ‘fact’ of Mandy’s immaturity to ask Penny to account for why she is feeling down: ‘So explain to me then why you’re down’. This is rhetorical because Mum clearly knows why Penny is feeling low. 16 Her point is that Mandy is not of sufficient standing to be impacting so negatively on Penny. However, Penny appears to treat Mum’s turn as literally holding her to account and begins to respond with an explanation (line 21). 17 In the meantime, Mum clarifies what she had meant by formulating a further question (lines 19–20): ‘Why do these people’s opinions matter’. This question is potentially asked on behalf of Penny and in service of aligning with her complaints. 18 The expected response from Penny might be along the lines of strong endorsement (e.g. ‘exactly’), but Penny again treats it literally, breaking off from her explanation to deal with Mum’s ‘question’. This is a complex set of turns, and the two speakers appear to be misaligned despite apparently agreeing with each other about the complainable nature of Mandy’s reported actions (and those of Penny’s father reported earlier).
The target reference ‘these people’ is a reference to Penny’s father and stepmother. That Penny hears it this way is evident from her subsequent turn (lines 22–23) in which she refers to having been ‘polite to them’. There is no doubt about whom this is a reference to, despite the minimal description of the referents. As a reference to persons who are well known to both interlocutors, it is clearly marked. Again, Mum could have selected from a range of explicitly pejorative alternative recognitionals (e.g. these bastards). In choosing ‘these people’, Mum does (at least) two things. First, she brings Penny’s dad back into the conversation where he had not been for some time. And second, she figuratively strips both referents of their kinship relationship to Penny; they are the sort of distant, unnameable people whose opinions should not impinge on her mood or self-worth. As with other examples we have seen, the reference is hostile, but its hostility is not inherent in its lexical form so much as in the social distance it constructs.
Although Penny treats the reference as adequate for recognition, she does appear to have trouble accepting the premise on which it was delivered. For Penny, it is precisely because she is in a kinship relationship with her Dad and Mandy that she has obligations to be ‘polite to them’ (lines 23–24) and has to ‘sit there and put up with it’ (26) and cannot actually just dismiss them (28–30) as if they were some distant unnameable strangers. Notice that Penny produces part of this list of obligations in the present tense, showing that for her this conduct is a modal and continuing aspect of her relationships with her father and stepmother rather than simply something she was forced to do on a single occasion. As it happens, Mum resists Penny’s reinstatement of familial roles (see the self-initiated repair on line 27).
In this extract, then, like previous examples, the particular formulation of reference contributes to an ongoing hostile action by distancing the referents from speakers and recipients, rendering them unnameable. The core feature connecting these examples is the designed shift of referents from their known status to an ostensibly unknown status. The action of not naming nameable persons is itself a pragmatic act. When the person is categorized, rather than named, the relational inferences of that category membership are put into play, manipulating the known relationships between speakers, recipients and referents, so that they stand in various permutations of togetherness or separateness (Stivers, 2007). In the preceding examples, the (attempted) engineering of relations consistently places referents outside of the speaker–recipient circle. This is achieved primarily by categorizing the (known) referent at the most general of levels – as a (gendered) person about whom we know little. But prefacing of categories with demonstrative pronouns might also be key to manipulating distance.
Role of demonstratives
Demonstratives – this, that, these and those – play an important role in reference, where they might be used to determine which of a class of objects (including persons) are indicated in the context of interaction: this paper (being written/read currently), that book (which we all know) (Quirk and Greenbaum, 1973). The indexical nature of demonstratives places them in the domain of deixis (Oh, 2007), where they are often glossed as expressing spatial location in relation to speaker/recipient context: the proximal ‘this’ and distal ‘that’ (Diessel, 1999; Hanks, 2005; Lyons, 1977). However, demonstratives are not limited to indexing physical space and appear to express a variety of indexical relations (see Enfield, 2003; Fillmore, 1997; Jarbou, 2010; Levinson, 2004) though, as Diessel (1999) notes, these other uses probably develop from the basic spatial use.
Enfield (2003: 88–90) argues that demonstrative systems can index interactionally ‘meaningful’ space rather than mere physical space. This is a more fluid concept that allows for, and accounts for, the richly varied pragmatic deployment of demonstratives in talk (see also Diessel, 2006; Marchello-Nizia, 2005). The meaningful space of interaction, or ‘here-space’, is both speaker- and recipient-centred (the latter through the maxim of recipient design) and refers to such transient qualities as focus, engagement, accessibility as well as attributions of speaker/recipient intention; here-space is whatever interlocutors construe as ‘here’ for particular moments in interaction. Drawing on Lao, Enfield shows that the demonstrative ‘nan’ (that) is used to convey that referents are outside of the interactional here-space, and ‘nii’ (this) when the referent is either within the here-space or when the boundaries of that space are non-specific or diffuse.
Enfield’s analysis fits with the English uses of ‘that’ focused on in this article: ‘that woman/man’ places the referent outside of the here-space. Interestingly, this might even apply when the third party is present, demonstrating Enfield’s point about the fluidity of here-space. Consider the next extract from a BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman following journalist Andrew Rawnsley’s (2010) allegations about the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s reported bullying of staff at Number 10.19,20 Rawnsley is present in the studio as the then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott is being interviewed, but does not, at this stage, participate in the interview. 21 Prescott is in a separate studio and appears on a large screen next to Paxman and Rawnsley. All have sight of each other and are analysably in each other’s interactional space. Rawnsley has just been interviewed by Paxman and had explained that he was confident of the veracity of his allegations because they came from ‘twenty-four carat sources’. As the extract begins, Paxman suggests to Prescott that Rawnsley’s allegations ‘sound plausible’. Prescott’s argument is that Rawnsley fails to provide reliable evidence to substantiate his claims.
Extract 4 [
The third party referent, then, is Andrew Rawnsley. In this extract, he is never referred to by name, though he is mentioned several times. The first is a locally subsequent formulation contained within ‘the big problem is him’, which Prescott utters with a head nod towards Rawnsley (lines 2–3). This occasions laughter from an unseen audience. It is likely that the laughter arises from both Prescott’s usurping Paxman’s opening, and from the reference to Rawnsley, in his presence, as ‘him’; the reference appears already to position Rawnsley outside of the Prescott/Paxman here-space, but paradoxically acknowledges his presence with the head nod. However, the target reference for current purposes is ‘that man’ (line 17), when Prescott says ‘that man has not given any proof of his allegations’. This reference is selected as an alternative to either a locally initial name or a simple locally subsequent ‘he’. The reference is categorical and minimally descriptive – a man, and is prefaced with the demonstrative ‘that’, and therefore fits with preceding examples. However, it is important to remember that the referent Rawnsley, unlike referents in previous extracts, is present and visible to both Paxman and Prescott. Rawnsley is not verbally participating in the interaction, but is nevertheless engaged in it as both its topic and its immediate audience. When Prescott utters ‘that man’, he does not use his body to point to the referent, and perhaps the only cue to his presence is the stress on ‘th
The demonstrative ‘that’ plus generic category places referents at a social distance, and this can occur even when the referent is present and engaged in the interaction. The distancing effects of this-prefaced categories (e.g. see Extract 2) are perhaps more difficult to explain in terms of the distal/proximal distinction (however fluid these concepts are). That is, we can ask what it is about the prototypical non-recognitional reference – a this-prefaced gender category (for an individual) – that constructs the reference as a non-recognitional. And what is the difference when the same form is used when the referent is known and recognition is achieved?
First, let’s examine a non-recognitional form used as a non-recognitional reference. The data come from a call between two 14-year-old girls – Emma and Sophie. Emma has speculated (incorrectly) that a particular brand of chocolate contains no dairy products. By way of evidence, she cites a school friend who eats only this brand of chocolate because it is dairy-free.
Extract 5 [
The target reference is ‘this girl at my school called Sally’ – an extended non-recognitional descriptor. The extended description is not intended to help the recipient to recognize the referent but, rather, to establish the speaker’s epistemic authority to speak about her evidentially. The reference is formulated as a locally initial and appears in locally initial position. Thereafter, the same referent is referred to again using pronouns. Accordingly, the references are not pragmatically marked. The indexicality of ‘this’ in ‘this girl . . .’ locates the referent in the speaker’s space, but outside that of the recipient. That is, the speaker could (and in fact does) name the referent, but understands that recognition is not consequential for the interaction (note the self-commentary line 8: I don’t know why that’s relevant . . .).
There are occasions when neither speaker nor recipient knows a referent and on these occasions the form [this] + [gender] is still used routinely. For example, in Extract 6, the speaker refers to a man (line 12) that had been exposed on a reality TV show for ‘cheating’ on his partner. As in Extract 5, the reference is formulated as a locally initial, in locally initial position, and subsequent references to him are pronouns. The indexicality of ‘this’ positions the referent loosely in the speaker’s space, as someone she, but not her recipient, had witnessed; the referent is speaker-side. Despite this, there is no sense here that the speaker could name the referent, so he is speaker-side in a most transient sense.
Extract 6 [
Prototypical non-recognitional reference places the referent, however loosely, on speaker-side. The reference itself is not pragmatically marked and simply conveys that the recipient does not (need to) know the referent.
In my collection, uses of the prototypical initial formulation for non-recognitional reference occur in locally subsequent position. That is, they are pragmatically marked because they are re-referring to a referent using the kind of reference typically reserved for initial mentions. Here are some examples.
In Extract 7, the referent is the speaker’s father and would typically be referred to by her either as ‘Dad’ (initially) or as ‘he’ (subsequently). In this case, though, she refers to him as ‘this guy’ (line 16). This is a re-referring because it occurs as part of a sequence in which she is complaining about the sort of things her father has said to her (going on and on and on) in front of her boyfriend (Stan), who is also mentioned in the extract (line 15).
Extract 7 [
In Extract 8, the referent is the recipient’s boyfriend and is named as Mark earlier in the call. Here, the caller, Debbie, refers to Mark in a locally subsequent position as ‘this guy’ (line 9), where ‘he’ would have been normative. This marked formulation occurs in a turn where Debbie is warning her friend Shelly that she would not react well to her cancelling plans just because her boyfriend is not participating.
Extract 8 [
In Extract 9, the referent is an institution: a UK mental healthcare team, called the Crisis Team. The caller has rung a mental health helpline to complain that the Crisis Team are harassing him by expecting entry into his home. 22 He re-refers to the Crisis Team as ‘they’ at line 25, and then again at line 31, but this time using an initial form, ‘these people’.
Extract 9 [
In Extract 10, the referent is another institution: the Welsh Assembly Government. The speaker’s son has died as a result of eating E. coli-infected meat and she is here commenting on the Welsh Assembly’s claim to have E. coli under control. Her argument is that the Assembly have no first-hand experience of the infection and have no right to suggest that the matter is resolved. The first two mentions of the Assembly are in full-form (lines 1 and 3), the third is in subsequent form (line 4) and the fourth is formulated as ‘these people’ (or more correctly, ‘the likes of these people’).
Extract 10 [Five Live – E. coli]
In these examples, the target references are re-referrings to a referent (or referents) already under discussion. In each case, the referents are known (about) to (by) the interlocutors and have been named using a recognitional format earlier in the discussion. The reference formulation ‘this guy’/‘these people’ is selected as an alternative to either an initial recognitional or a simple locally subsequent pronoun. Given that the referents are already under discussion, it might be that the indexical part of the reference – this or these – does more directly deictic work than the same form used in locally initial position (to do non-recognitional reference). That is, in these extracts the demonstratives index a particular person, people or organization already introduced to the interaction. In non-recognitional reference the deictic work of ‘this/these’ is more abstract.
In this section, I have tried to explicate the ways in which demonstrative pronouns contribute to the social distancing action of generic categorical reference. Analysis of the reference form [demonstrative] + [pn-adequate category] points to the relationship between lexis, grammar and action (see Hakulinen and Selting, 2005), or more prosaically, to matters of turn-design (see Drew, 2012). Overwhelmingly, the form is used to knowingly and markedly make known others unnameable, and is constitutive of a hostile action. 24 As with all reference, the action is also dependent on positioning and recipiency (Schegloff, 1996).
Conclusion
In referring to others in talk, speakers have available a range of referring expressions. There are default practices for doing simple referring and marked practices that constitute a social action of some kind (Schegloff, 1996). In this article, I have described a marked practice that departs from the default practice by selecting a minimally descriptive formulation – [demonstrative] + [pn-adequate category] – as an alternative to either a name or to a simple pronoun. In all cases, the speaker can (and often earlier does) name the referent and is therefore actively selecting not to name on this occasion.
Following Stivers (2007), a reference formulation that shifts a nameable referent to a category manipulates the social distance between speakers, recipients and referents by invoking different kinds of norms and obligations associated with the category given. I have shown that the shift from naming to category can involve an enormous transfer from known person to ostensible stranger. This move occurs by describing the person in minimal terms – as a man or woman – the kind of description used when we do not know a person. Of course, in the cases examined here, the person (people or organization) is known and presumably describable in a number of alternative ways: from nameable person through to various category memberships. Positioning a known someone as an ‘unknown other’ involves both not naming and not categorizing in terms that are perhaps unique to the referent. For the action to ‘work’ though, the referent has to remain recognitional. The ‘doing’ of not naming and the ‘doing’ of not identifying by unique category relies on the known ability (and perhaps social obligation) to do both of these things. That is, it is only because we (or more accurately, recipients) know that, for example, Clinton could have named Lewinsky or otherwise identified her through more richly descriptive means that we see him as actively not doing either. Paradoxically, then, the action of ‘unknowing’ a known person relies on interlocutors recognizing the referent in the first place.
Using reference form to increasing social distance beyond what is known appears to be implicated in practices for complaining about third parties. As Drew (1998) points out, description of persons and events is always selected from a range of possible alternatives. Description is therefore accountable and links directly to the relationship between language and morality. As former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown found to his cost, socially distancing a referent in the service of a complaint against them can invite comment and even objection. Speakers are accountable for the forms of reference they select. In some ways, selection of a minimally descriptive reference form as an alternative to other available recognitional forms appears relatively benign: ‘that woman’ when the referent is a woman appears less objectionable than ‘that bigot’. Yet the relationships between speakers, recipients and referents are key to social conduct and the obligations that people have to each other. Positioning known others as unnameable and as indescribable in all but the most generic terms undermines (or perhaps ironically underlines – Extract 1) their (known) social responsibilities towards parties to the interactions. This is particularly clear in Extract 3, when a mother in conversation with her daughter refers to her former husband and his new partner – the recipient’s father and stepmother – as ‘these people’. In selecting this reference form, the speaker means to strip away normative relational conduct that might oblige a daughter to take seriously the criticisms of those in a parental role. As it happens, although the daughter does not explicitly object to the reference form, she does resist her mother’s attempted manipulation of social distance.
The stripping away of a referent’s normative conduct occurs across this collection. A friend with bestowed obligations to sell her friend’s house is dismissed (Extract 2). The obligations of a romantic relationship are minimized in comparison to those of friendship (Extract 8). The obligations of a mental healthcare team to support a patient in his own home are rejected (Extract 9), as are the rights of a government to pronounce on matters of public health (Extract 10). This hostile manipulation of normative conduct is, in each case, partly constituted by the reference form, which makes the referents unnameable. In a sense, Gillian Duffy’s observation that Gordon Brown’s reference to her as ‘that woman’ treats her as if she is ‘to be brushed away’ neatly sums up the action of the particular formulation targeted in this article.
The connection between hostility and reference form points to the ways in which social action is ‘furthered by particular linguistic forms and ways of using them’ (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting, 2001: 3). I would take ‘ways of using them’ to include matters of sequence and recipiency – where in a course of interaction the reference form is deployed and to whom it is uttered. On this point, I want to comment on the gendered content of gendered categorical reference. Feminist conversation analysts have made a distinction between linguistically gendered lexical terms and the interactional work of ‘doing’ gender (Jackson, 2011; Kitzinger, 2007; Stockill and Kitzinger, 2007). It is notable that minimal categorical description of persons routinely uses gendered lexis. And the prominence of gendered categories is telling about the mundane ways in which speakers label others, what Kessler and McKenna (1978) call the primacy of the gender attribution. Gendered lexis undoubtedly makes the gendered membership of persons available, but it does not follow that it makes gender relevant for the interaction (see Edwards, 1998). In any case, as Jackson (2011) shows, gendering does not necessarily depend on linguistically gendered resources.
Nonetheless, we might note that speakers have available a range of linguistically gendered categories from which to select: woman/lady/girl . . . or man/guy/ boy . . . . Analysts might examine the work done by the selection of one form over another. For example, in Extract 2, Miss Cooper is referred to as ‘this girl’. We have no sense of Miss Cooper’s actual age, but we do know that she is engaged in adult conduct. So, Miss Cooper is an adult and the selection of ‘girl’ to refer to a woman adds something to the markedness of the reference, possibly by downgrading her status; she was not fit for the responsible role of selling a house (see Stokoe, 2011).
In this article, I hope to have contributed to the conversation analytic literature on person reference by elucidating a practice for making strangers of known others through referring to them in the form [demonstrative] + [pn-adequate category], in circumstances where a name could have been used. This minimal description of others tends to be used in complaints and is particularly fitted for stripping the referent of the basis of their relationships to speakers and recipients.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
With sincere thanks to Paul Drew for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Celia Kitzinger, whose early guidance and encouragement on this work was invaluable. Finally, I am very grateful for the anonymous reviewer’s insightful and constructive responses, which helped greatly to improve the article. Any errors are my own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.