‘Why do these people’s opinions matter?’ Positioning known referents as unnameable others

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.