CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Nick J. Enfield (The Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen): " The paradox of being ordinary: the case of default person reference in Lao. " Nov. 29, 2006, 5pm. Haines 332.

Social actions may be formulated in "marked" or "unmarked" ways. A claim in research in pragmatics and conversation analysis is that marked formulations "do more". For example, if I refer to John using a marked referring expression like 'His majesty' (e.g. 'His majesty says he would like another beer'), this special formulation draws attention to itself, and "does something more" (e.g. signals that I am complaining about John) in addition to just achieving reference. By contrast, with a default referring expression like 'John' it is claimed that I simply refer to John and do nothing more. But do default forms of person reference really "do nothing more than refer"? The claim seems straightforward in a language like English, where default person reference is by bare first name (John, Mary, etc.). But in many languages default forms of person reference explicitly encode information about social relations. With reference to a corpus of video-recorded conversation, I describe some norms of person reference in Lao (a SW Tai language of Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia), where speakers standardly encode the social position of a referent as "lower" or "higher" than themselves. I discuss theoretical and methodological implications for research on talk in interaction.