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The Discursive Construction of Identities On- and Offline: Personal - group - collective
Edited by Birte Bös, Sonja Kleinke, Sandra Mollin and Nuria Hernández
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 78] 2018
► pp. 153–176

Indeterminate us and them: The complexities of referentiality, identity and group construction in a public online discussion

| University of Heidelberg and University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
| University of Heidelberg and University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

This paper reinvestigates the polarizing effects of indeterminate first- and third-person plural pronouns and determiners (i.e. the we-set and the they-set) from a Digital Discourse perspective. Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and a cognitive-linguistic approach, it tackles the double-indexical nature of the use of the we-set and the they-set by the participants of the public discussion forum UK Debate. Our analysis of a sample thread considers both the referential and the propositional level and shows how users construct and negotiate potential in- and out-group referents at different degrees of specificity and as ranging between immediate discourse participants and external referents. Our analysis shows how major cognitive domains are triggered and how the specific selections of predications as cognitive access points form oscillating clusters of salient in- and out-group attributes. In this way, the analysis also aims to reveal manifestations of more permanent cultural and mental models.

Keywords: indeterminate first- and third-person-plural pronouns, double indexicality, referentiality, predications, cognitive domains, salience, power
Article outline
  • 1.Aims, data and methodology
  • 2.‘Identity’ and ‘referentiality’ in public online discussions
  • 3.Anaphoric, cataphoric and indeterminate pronoun reference in the sample thread
  • 4.Negotiating referential identity – the we-set and the they-set in indeterminate uses in the sample thread
    • 4.1The we-set
    • 4.2The they-set
  • 5.Constructing complex identities – predicating expressions and the propositional level
    • 5.1The they-set
    • 5.2The we-set
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 23 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.78.07kle
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