"As if It Wasn't Me and as if It Wasn't You": Pragmatics of Referential Glide in Spoken Language

Abstract

The article explores pragmatic functions of the “communicative mummery” – phenomenon ob-servable in everyday communication and consisting in some referential slides that happen in the communicative act trivial schema “I talk to You Here and Now”: the speaker can communicate as if he wasn’t himself but someone else or if he was talking to another person but not to his real communicative partner. Unlike a simple trickery the communicative mummery isn’t hidden from the speaker’s interlocutor. Conversely, experiencing such transfigurations (I speak, if it wasn’t me…etc.) the speaker intentionally uses a range of prosodic and/or non verbal markers such as special gaze, gesturing that isn’t familiar to him, specific accent or prosodic contours for attract-ing his partner attention. The discursive manifestations of communicative mummery have some common features with the reported speech and the polyphonic conversational humor phenomena but, in the same time, display its own particulars properties and perform rather special functions in conversation. Firstly remarked in mother-child communication as a particular mother’s practice of child socialization the discussed phenomenon was also found in adults’ heterogeneous speech interactions that, after having been collected in a corpus of 52 items, served as a data for our analysis. It shows that the main pragmatic functions of communicative mummery is to prevent the speaker’s social face loss in case if he violates social conventions regulating communicative behavior in the situations of social enforcement, social guilt or self-praising.