Abstract
AbstractMembership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*
Highlights
In his pioneering study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) describes how everyday actors present themselves so as to manage the impression licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 0047-4045/21 $15.00Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
Callers are speaking as anonymous strangers to the host, and for an overhearing audience, having called to offer opinions on topics of general public interest. They do this by assessing, blaming, claiming, complaining, and the like. This dataset proved to be a perspicuous setting for locating a range of practices used to establish an accountable basis for the opinion a caller expresses, so as to either give it more weight or to avoid it being discounted, including on the basis of the caller’s membership in a particular category. We introduce the self-referencing practice of contrastive entanglement as the culmination of our report
Extract (6) presents a case in which no membership category is mentioned in a selfreference, but the action formed up in the turn comes to be treated as mistakenly implying a categorical identity for its speaker
Summary
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959) describes how everyday actors present themselves so as to manage the impression. Abie, in contributing to a discussion of a controversial newspaper article that has been criticized as insulting to Black South Africans, explicitly claims to be speaking “as a human being” (line 5) This upfront claim, especially given the direct relevance of race to the topic at hand, reveals Abie’s orientation to the possibility that, were he to begin without an explicit categorical disavowal, his opinion could be understood as implicating a category-bound stance—and the simple self-references at lines 7 and 9 might be (mis)understood as implicating Abie’s membership in a racial category. The position Abie formulates is not one, in the first place, addressed to the complainable matter at hand (that an article treats Black people in an insulting manner); rather, he is proposing a broader principle about insulting people in general, not formulating it as ( just) a racial issue— the racial matter at hand is subsumed under this general principle
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