Deixis and the Interactional Construction of Context

Natural languages provide speakers with options and with constraints upon these options. A substantial body of research has shown that what motivates speakers' choices of linguistic forms are not only linguistic constraints but also social and interactional constraints of various types (Goffman 1974) and, furthermore, that these choices are part of the very means by which speakers encode or 'indicate' dimensions of the context of talk (Gumperz 1982).
Much less attention has however been paid to the ways in which speakers' choices of linguistic forms not only reflect properties of the context but also contribute to creating the interactionally relevant dimensions of context. This is the idea that I will explore in the present paper by examining speakers' deictic use of the French pronominal forms 'on'/'nous' [we] and 'je' [I] in a segment of face-to-face interaction. My purpose, thereby, is twofold. First, I aim to illustrate that the motivations and the functions of speakers' coding options are crucially related to the structure of the activities accomplished in the process of talk. And second, I want to argue that a contextualized analysis may provide a rich complement to evidence drawn from the study of the use of forms in isolated utterances or utterance pairs, in that it allows us to interpret forms of reference beyond their purely referential functionality as part of the means by which talk is constructed as a social activity.