On the fundamentals of person reference

This chapter focuses on person-reference in a Pacific island society. Rossel island, roughly equidistant between Queensland, the New Guinea mainland, and the Solomons, is inhabited by a people who speak a language isolate called Yélî Dnye (classed ‘Papuan’, which here means simply ‘not Austronesian’). Ethnographic situations are natural experiments, which indicate the possibility of space for solutions to human problems. In this case, part of the interest is that Rossel Island is a closed universe of 4000 souls, linked by (mostly) known genealogical relations – in principle, any adult participant knows all other possible person referents. This closes off one whole parameter of person reference (the ‘non-recognitionals’ of Sacks and Schegloff, this volume) without resorting to experimental control. Another particular source of interest is that, as in many simple societies, the use of names is hedged around with restrictions and taboos. Together these constraints ensure that in many cases participants refer to persons inexplicitly, yet expect recipients to know exactly who they are talking about.

The approach I adopt here is to focus in on repair of third-person reference, concentrating especially on cases where recipients have to ask in effect ‘Who?’. The reasons for this focus will be carefully spelt out, but it will be useful to have the main points in advance. Repair is interesting because it tells us what the participants themselves find problematic.