ABSTRACT
Stewardess: Excuse me, Sir, there’s been a little problem in the cockpit. Passenger: The cockpit! What is it? Stewardess: It’s a little room at the front of the plane where the pilot sits,
but that’s not important right now. Humour frequently depends on the violation of linguistic rules and expectations, and this exchange is no exception. But the relevance of the comic extract to the present chapter is that it raises the question of what the norms of usage of the impersonal pronoun it and the demonstrative pronouns this and that are, and why the stewardess’s response to the question ‘What is it?’ is absurd in this situation. If the passenger had not known what a cockpit was, he would probably have asked: ‘The cockpit? What’s that?’, rather than ‘What is it?’ or ‘What’s this?’, Clearly, it, this and that occupy separate domains in the way they attach to items in discourse which should be amenable to description.
