The present contribution examines how interlocutors resolve reference problems concerning the second singular person (2sg) in ongoing conversation. Apart from its ‘normal’ reading as a term of address, generic and also speaker-referring uses have been documented and studied for a variety of languages. However, there are amazingly few documented cases of interlocutors who openly display having problems of disambiguation between forms of address and reference to a larger entity ‘anybody in this particular situation’. A sequential analysis shows that interlocutors tend not to ask for further specification of reference in a possibly ambiguous situation, most likely for face reasons: Instead, they tend to rely on contextualization in later conversational development and on all available conversational resources. Ambiguous reference that leads to misunderstandings only becomes a topic once serious conversational problems arise and the need for disambiguation becomes more important than interlocutors’ face needs.

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Canonical linguistic theory postulates a one-on-one referential link between linguistic elements and agents, experiencers, cognizers or patients of certain actions, beliefs, states etc. in the world. Likewise, personal pronouns and person marking through verb morphology have often been described as having a one-on-one referential link with an (interaction) participant. As with all deictic expressions, interpretation of personal pronouns is crucially dependent on the context (e.g. I referring to the speaker, you to the hearer). However, Bühler's well-known concept of Deixis am Phantasma (1934) already shows that reference can be established to items beyond the immediate discourse situation, with interlocutors jointly constructing reference even to hypothetical, future-oriented or counterfactual discourse scenarios. Reference, especially pronominal reference, is not always established easily, as the vast literature on referentiality in several linguistic and philosophical disciplines attests (to name but a few recent contributions: Abbott 2010 for an overview of mostly semantic conceptualizations of reference, Kibrik 2011 for a recent study on reference in discourse, and of course Siewierska 2004 for an in-depth discussion of person reference). Most contributions either focus on third person references (singular or plural, henceforth, 3sg and 3pl; e.g. Borthen 2010, Cabredo Hofherr 2003, and most articles in Enfield/Stivers 2007), or they discuss the inclusion and/or exclusion of the speaker in a group referred to using 1st person plural forms (henceforth, 1pl). Helmbrecht (2015) does offer a more general typology of non-prototypical readings of various persons. In languages without a morphological inclusive/exclusive distinction, the pragmatics of inclusive or exclusive readings have been analyzed as well (e.g. Temmerman 2008; Scheibman 2002 & 2004). On the other hand, reference to singular speaker and hearer (1sg and 2sg) is typically portrayed as unproblematic from a referential point of view, though attention has been drawn to the existence of different participant statuses (Goffman 1979; Ducrot's 1984 polyphony analysis; Halliday 1994). In order to complete our view of the use of speaker and hearer reference, this volume focuses on some uses of the 1 st and 2 nd person (singular as well as plural) where the canonical adscription of pronominal reference is 'violated' by the speaker for pragmatic reasons. This results in referential ambiguity of personal pronouns, which is understood in this volume as uses where the person being referred to cannot be pinned down unequivocally. Such uses can be exploited by interlocutors to their conversational advantage, but an important drawback of referentially ambiguous forms is, of course, the danger of being misunderstood. We want to discuss which linguistic strategies are employed by interlocutors to ensure conversational success and to avoid misunderstandings caused by referential ambiguity.

The main focus of this section is the concept of identity. Taking different methodological approaches, the authors show how various aspects of the speakers’ identity as well as personal relationships are indexed through the use of pronominal forms of address. As Raymond (this volume) stresses, the way we refer to each other is “one of the primary means through which we (re-)create and (re-)establish our respective identities”, how we wish to be seen by others and how we openly categorize others in relation to ourselves, as equals, subordinates or superiors, in whatever category we focus on at the moment of talking. In what follows, I will first summarize some key points of the respective papers before setting them into perspective with each other.

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