“You need to have a feel for it”: The role of pronouns and particles within practices of positioning in norm conflict situations

Abstract

Talking about language use in touristic encounters is a fruitful starting point for the investigation of positioning: mobility brings people into contact, which frequently results in conflicting norms about language use. An interactional analysis of interviews with tourism providers focusses on examples of pronoun use and pronoun shifting related to modal particles that accompany positioning in argumentation. An additional quantitative analysis sheds light on the relationship between the use of individual and generic personal pronouns and the German modal particles halt (‘just’) and einfach (‘simply’) in causal and conditional clauses. Despite their similar meaning, the two particles are shown to be unevenly distributed according to age and sentence types. A socio-pragmatic analysis reveals the conflicting positions interviewees take in the tourism industry and their use of generic pronouns and epistemic utterances to strengthen their argumentation as experts shifting between we, one, I and you, indicating the competence of taking different viewpoints. The use of generic pronouns in particular proves to be accompanied by modal particles, especially when an argument is opened or closed. Making use of deixis am phantasma, they point to general convictions and professional expertise in cases of uncertainty about conflicting norms.