Introduction

We began this book with a collection of examples illustrating what could be innovative, new, and different in language as opposed to fixed, old, and the same. After suggesting that an expanded and extended version of variation analysis could help us understand two different arenas of language use in which these oppositions appear – reference and narrative – we analyzed variation within both arenas by focusing on what happens when either recurs in ‘second position.’ Each recurrence was different in some way from the first, if only because it was the second ‘doing’ of something that had already appeared in discourse. Sometimes the same concept or meaning reappeared in other words. Other times, the same word reappeared in different texts, in constellations of different words. Sites of second position varied by type and distance, ranging from a word repeated immediately after its completion to a life story narrative told more than ten years apart. My review in this concluding chapter of redoing referrals (Section 9.2) and replaying narratives (Section 9.3) addresses several topics and themes that crosscut both areas of research. I close with general comments about how the analyses are related to several key constructs drawn from different approaches to discourse (Section 9.4).

Redoing referrals

Referrals are communicative attempts by a speaker to evoke a referent (the idea a speaker has of something in the world) through a referring expression. Accomplishing a referral requires interactive coordination between speaker production and hearer interpretation.