Hiroaki Tanaka
Kyoto Institute of Technology
Abstract
First mentioned reference resolution: How people can operate in their interaction with their others egocentrically and cooperatively to refer to someone/something else for the first time
By definition, speakers are supposed to produce well-designed utterances by expressively considering the alleged common knowledge they assume to be shared with addressees. In actuality, however, speakers often take into account of their own knowledge, in that their behavior is egocentric on the first stage of interaction to the extent that it is anchored to their own knowledge rather than to mutual knowledge. On the second stage, addressees are able to return well-designed utterances to the egocentric speakers via such strategies as question-answer, confirmation, and organization of repair. On the final stage, the addressees’ behavior is conducted, on the bases of adjustment to others’ view, such as common ground formation, and taking others’ view into their own (theory of mind).
This paper focusses on and revises/argues against “Egocentric Anchoring and Adjustment Model of Perspective Taking,” mentioned above, i.e., “adults design and interpret utterances from an egocentric perspective, adjusting to the other’s perspective only when they make an error (Keysar, Barr & Horton, 1998, and many others),” in the case of first mentioned reference resolution in naturally occurring conversation in English and Japanese.
The main claim of the paper is that similar strategies to the three stages of interaction are developed for jointly made utterances of person/thing reference, but such strategies are accounted for in terms of speakers’ quasi-/secondary level of egocentricity and addressees’ perspective taken by them. People sometimes experience a breakdown in communication, when they mention someone’s/something’s name for the first time that others may not know, behaving, on the face of it, in a complete egocentric way. Even in such cases, there is always a reason to use a fist mentioned reference in English and Japanese, which is evidenced by the topic on the name in question already presented in advance by the speaker in English and a particle such as –tte (‘which is called’) attenuating a psychological burden of reference searching on the address’s side in Japanese. There is no need to hypothesize the extreme/authentic level of egocentricity, but the need for the more intertwined hypothesis between egocentricity and adjustment is required, which is evidenced by a speaker’s long pause to encourage the addressee to search the reference and an interruption or overlapping by him when he reform the other’s words.
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