The York Research Database

Speakers of English have available a set of terms dedicated to doing individual self-reference: 'I' and its grammatical variants, 'me', 'my', I mine" etc. Speaker selection of other than these dedicated terms may invite special attention for what has prompted their use. This article draws on field recordings of talk-in-interaction in which speakers use 'third-person' reference forms when speaking about themselves (e.g. when a woman says of her husband that 'he's married to an Englishwoman'). We show that third-person forms are recurrently used for representing the views of someone else (a recipient or a non-present person, an indeterminate member of a category of persons, or an organization). We also show how - by drawing on resources such as the distinction between recognitional and non-recognitional person reference forms, and on category bound attributes - the particular third-person term selected can be fitted to and thereby contribute to the action(s) a speaker is implementing through their turn at talk.