4 - From linguistic reference to social reality

Summary

Introduction

One of the fundamental tasks of talk is to refer to something in the world – a person, place, thing – in a way that will not only capture our own sense of what that something is, but will also allow our hearers to adequately recognize what we are talking about. So central is this task that Brown (1995: 62) assigns reference priority in understanding language: “the most crucial feature of each utterance, the feature which a listener must minimally grasp in order to begin to understand the utterance, is the expression used to identify what the speaker is talking about.”

The linguistic form through which we convey what we are talking about is the noun phrase, either a full noun phrase (e.g. the boy, a new family on the block, my high school friends, her house) or a pronoun (e.g. he, they, we, it). Often what we are talking about are people, especially specific people with whom we have had some personal experience. When we do so, our nouns and pronouns do more than just refer to an entity that is “human” and “animate”: they display characters who go on to reveal complex attributes, take specific actions, and form social relationships with other characters within a textual world that varies over time and across space. These very same characters, however, emerge within another site of social action and interaction: a concrete social world that forms its own microcosmic and fleeting world.