ABSTRACT
Reference to people is a process in which speakers respond to both the informational context of the discourse and the social relationships involved. This chapter aims to supplement with a consideration of how social relationships influence the same choice when referring. It focuses on how the referent’s social status relative to the speaker affects accessibility marking of third-person referents rather than on management of social relationships through the choice of specific forms, such as using a name with or without a title attached. The chapter considers the case of English-speaking learners of Japanese, using longitudinal spoken data from role-plays and a narrative task from six learners at two stages of development, with comparison data from six Japanese native speakers. The learners’ accessibility marking patterns are shown to be somewhat different depending on whether the third-person referent is of a similar or higher social status.
