This book, the first systematic exploration of the third person in English, German, and French, takes a fresh look at person reference within the realm of political discourse. By focusing on the newly refined speech role of the target, attention is given to the continuity between second and third grammatical persons as a system. The role played by third-person forms in creating and maintaining interpersonal relationships in discourse has been surprisingly overlooked. Until now, third-person forms have overwhelmingly been considered as referring to the absent, i.e. to someone outside the communication situation, other than the speaker or the hearer: the “nonperson”. By broadening the scope and finally integrating the third person, we come to understand The Politics of Person Reference fully, and to see the strategic, argumentative, and dialogical nature of the act of referring to other discourse participants, understood as the act of creating new referents.
Author(s): Naomi Truan
Publisher: John Benjamins
Year: 2021
Language: English
City: Amsterdam/Philadelphia
The Politics of Person Reference
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Table of contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
1.1 Person reference: A strategic, argumentative, and dialogical act
1.2 The third person and the target
1.3 Scope and structure of this study
2. Finding the missing third person
2.1 Assigning reference, or who are you talking about?
2.2 (Why) Is the third person so special?
2.3 The third person in political discourse
3. Speech roles revisited
3.1 Who frames speech roles? A note on the speaker
3.2 Macro and micro levels: Speech event, turn, utterance
3.3 Public and audience: A macro perspective on hearers’ types
3.3.1 The public attending the debate
3.3.2 The absent audience
3.4 Addressee vs. target: A micro perspective on speech roles
3.5 A tentative definition of target as a speech role
4. Referring to people in parliamentary interaction
4.1 Corpus: Parliamentary debates in comparison
4.1.1 Defining a common genre and a common topic
4.1.2 A brief note on the xml annotation
4.1.3 On the role of reference corpora
4.1.4 The genre of parliamentary debates as an entry point
4.2 Talking and debating at the parliament
4.2.1 Debates between monologue and dialogue
4.2.2 Parliamentary communities of practice
4.3 Methodology: Searching for third-person forms
4.3.1 Perks and challenges of lemmatization
4.3.2 Ensuring the comparability of the data
4.3.3 Performing queries on selected lemmas
4.3.4 Contrasting, counting, analyzing?
5. Performing democracy
5.1 Alternative views
5.1.1 ‘Naturally one can go this way’
5.1.2 ‘For those who believe […], naturally, there is no problem’
5.2 Discourse and metadiscourse
5.2.1 ‘As one says’
5.2.2 ‘One can debate’
5.3 Questions and answers
5.3.1 ‘Some may ask’
5.3.2 Shifting referents
6. Targeting the opponents
6.1 Assessing the opponents’ views as wrong
6.1.1 ‘Those who think that… are wrong’
6.1.2 ‘Anyone who believes… is wrong’
6.2 When illocutionary force is at stake: Acting on the targets
6.2.1 ‘Those who should’
6.2.2 ‘All should’
6.2.3 ‘All should, that is: You should’
7. Pragmatic meaning & plasticity of third-person forms
7.1 ‘Some, thinking they were Zorro’
7.2 ‘Some found it and still find it too dramatic’
7.3 The plasticity of some
8. Pointing at colleagues
8.1 Non-specificity, indirectness, and politeness
8.2 Addressing and mentioning: The system of person reference
8.2.1 ‘One’: Indeterminate, non-specific, and indirect?
8.2.2 ‘Someone’ (and we all know who)
8.2.3 ‘Anyone who’ (but not really anyone, all things considered)
8.2.4 ‘Those who’ (but more specifically ‘the one who’)
8.3 ‘Call me by my name’: Proper names and reference assignation
8.3.1 ‘Whoever’ (Mr. Struck indeed)
8.3.2 Naming Members of Parliament
8.3.3 Naming absent discourse participants
8.4 ‘Save me from naming them by name’: The pragmatics of hints
8.4.1 Approaching the notion of salience
8.4.2 From salient referents to targets
8.4.3 From salience to the identification of the referents
8.4.4 From reference assignation to contested meaning
9. Acknowledging calls in-between
9.1 The reconstruction of the referents
9.1.1 ‘Someone says’
9.1.2 ‘Those who are yelling’
9.2 An act of non-address: Refusing the dialogue
9.3 Jumping into a cross fire: ‘He did not say that’
10. Conclusion
10.1 The challenge of parliamentary discourse
10.2 The politics of person reference
10.3 Prospects for further research
Bibliography
Concepts Index
Lexical Units Index
