Managing the Categorical Relevance of Self-Reference

• In Event: 2364 - Stance in Social Interaction

Abstract

As Schegloff (2007:123) notes, self-reference is usually accomplished in English through “the dedicated term ‘I’ (and its grammatical variants – me, my, mine, etc.)”, which “is opaque with respect to all the usual key categorical dimensions – age, gender, status and the like”. However, Land and Kitzinger (2007) demonstrate that speakers sometimes turn to alternative forms of self-reference to make explicit the relevance of particular membership categories in referring to themselves. Nevertheless, speakers do not always turn to such explicit formulations to “categorize” self-reference. In this report, we build on this and other conversation analytic research on self-reference and membership categorization (e.g., Jackson 2011; Kitzinger 2007; Land and Kitzinger 2007; Lerner and Kitzinger 2007; West and Fenstermaker 2002) by examining how speakers manage the (possible) categorical relevance of self-references, and the interactional trouble that this may occasion. We first examine instances of tacitly categorized self-reference, in which the reference is evidently employed to profess the speaker’s membership in a category despite the associated membership category never being mentioned prior to or as part of the self-reference. We then consider occasions on which trouble arises from such categorized self-references either not being recognized as such by recipients, or being mis-recognized as making relevant a category other than the one to which the speaker is thereby revealed to have been oriented. Finally, we describe cases in which a speaker disavows speaking as a member of category they could be understood as having (tacitly) made relevant via the thick particulars of content and context.

Authors

• Kevin A. Whitehead, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Gene H. Lerner, University of California

• Celia C. Kitzinger, University of York