Abstract for Conveying_Who_You_Are:_The_presentation_of_self,_strictly_speaking
In what follows, I first present a few elements of
our current understanding of person reference
drawn from past work on which the later parts of
the chapter draw and which they presuppose.
Secondly, I describe briefly some more recent
work that complements the earlier work with
results on other languages, and thereby
contributes to specifying the import of the
recipient-design and minimization preferences.
Finally, I take up self-reference in the special
environment described above – an environment that
may fall victim to the march of technology, as
telephones come increasingly to be attached to
persons and not to places. By the end of the last
of these sections, we will see that speakers
fashion even more elegant solutions in reconciling
the constraints of recipient design and
minimization in doing self-reference than is the
case in third-person reference. Finally, the
discussion will turn briefly to extend the
analysis from recipient-design as represented in
personal recognizability, that is in ‘knowing who
it is’, to the bearing on self-reference of the
action/topic/context that has been made relevant
by the recipient.
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