Institute of Geography. The School of Geosciences.The University of Edinburgh
Abstract
A person X says to person Y ‘it’s here”. A common enough thing for someone to say to
someone else, and a common enough expression for both to understand, yet professional
analysts of language are troubled by what ‘it’s here’ means, it seems of quite a different
order to ‘this is a tree’ or ‘if you do not eat meat then you are a vegetarian’. It would not
be uncommon for certain logicians or linguists to stay with the words themselves. In
staying with the words themselves, cutting away what class, gender or age of person said
such words to what other category of person. Cutting away at what time period, in which
culture and various other elements. Cutting away, then, most of the context and dealing
with the words as if their meaning was internal to themselves.
There are two things I should mention about ‘it’s here.’ Firstly, it is a favourite sort of
example used to teach what indexicals in language are. Words which we rely on finding
their sense by reference to their local use. Words which cause endless troubles for formal
logic and for translation software. Secondly, ‘it’s here’, while not a bizarre instance, in fact
recognisably and acceptably ordinary, is a made-up example. As a first step in an
ethnomethodological direction I would like to shift our attention to some words actually
said, come upon in looking for something else. Harvey Sacks throughout his studies of
conversation analysis warned his students (and those other colleagues in receipt of his
lectures) to avoid beginning with a theory and then either inventing a suitable example or
looking for a quote from a transcript to pull out to illustrate it. For the former what any
member of your research community views as reasonable provides the limit on suitable
examples and for the latter, why bother with ordinary conversation at all