The 8th biennial conference of the International Network of Address Research (INAR 8) has just taken place at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon). Among the academic activities programmed was a special panel for the presentation of the upcoming book Beyond binaries in address research: Politeness and identity practices in interaction, edited by María Irene Moyna and Víctor Fernández-Mallat, and published by John Benjamins.
Miguel A. Aijón Oliva’s «No se puede ser más tonto: Referential inference and address strategies in comments to Spanish digital news» is the last chapter in the book and one that puts forward an approach to address that largely supersedes traditional (binary) models. Speakers can indeed resort to varied strategies to refer to their interactional partners. These include third persons as well as defocusing constructions such as hearer-dominant uses of the plural first person (e.g. Nos callamos un poco ‘Could we be quiet now?’), impersonal deontic constructions (Hay que limpiar la habitación ‘The room needs cleaning’), passive and impersonal reflexives (as in the title of the chapter, No se puede ser más tonto ‘That is as stupid as can be’), and so forth. They all can contextually be intended to allude to an audience, even if apparently construing a nonspecific reference. Address can thus be understood as a matter of whether people can and do consider themselves to be referenced by an expression, based on an inferential process that relies on both linguistic and non-linguistic contextual cues, as well as on shared knowledge.
The investigation is based on a corpus of digital news pieces from Salamanca, and specifically on readers’ comments to them. Qualitative analysis shows that commenters can address a variety of possible audiences, including other specific commenters or all participants along a thread, the main actors of the events recounted in the news, the editorial staff, or different social groups and institutions. In turn, quantitative analysis makes it possible to unveil correlations between different referential intentions and grammatical constructions. While second and third person forms are the preferred choices to address specific people, defocusing constructions often appear in connection with other kinds of intended addressees, most significantly public institutions. this also makes it possible to envisage a continuum of addressee (de)focusing along which different grammatical choices can be ordered.
Further information on the Beyond binaries book can be found here.
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