Sun-Young Oh
English Zero Anaphora as an Interactional Resource
This study is part of a larger project that examines speakers’ practices for referring to people in English and Korean, addressing some of the issues that have been largely neglected so far (e.g., the interactional uses of zero anaphora in English, and of overt self- or recipient-reference and demonstrative-based quasi-pronouns in Korean). This study specifically investigates English speakers’ practices of employing zero anaphora (or omission of an overt reference term) in ordinary conversations, with special reference to the kind of interactional work that they accomplish by the practice. The findings demonstrate that unlike previously-held assumptions, zero anaphora may be systematically deployed by English speakers in order to achieve certain interactional functions, for example, marking the current talk as a second saying or displaying the secondary level of the action being done by the current talk. This paper thus establishes zero anaphora, which has been frequently treated as an accident, or disorderly product of a casual way of speaking, as a serious resource in the construction of conversational interaction by English speakers. Three additional functions of English zero anaphora (i.e., resuming a prior turn-constructional unit after a parenthetical insert, marking maximum continuity, and avoiding a choice among alternative reference forms) are identified and discussed in an article to be published in an upcoming issue of Discourse Studies.
Sun-Young Oh is Assistant Professor in the department of English Language Education at Seoul National University in Korea, where she teaches courses in Conversation Analysis, Applied Linguistics, and English grammar.
