Focus of attention in discourse 135this is used in subsequent (instead of, or even as well as, initial) reference
to a given entity:
(16)
L 30
Caller: You spoke a little while ago to a man.hhh with regard to uh
law,//an’ murder.
Crandall: Yes ma’am...
L 70
Caller: ...you were talking about, or was he anyway,//that man
Crandall: well, no:: Now you see this the- again we come back to this:
Murder is the act of killing someone, by, an- a specific
dee:duh, described in the law of the sovereign state in which
you live, as being unjustified.
Caller: Now/
Caller: Yuh know/
L 76
Caller: By the d- conversation that chu had with this man: my im-
pression was that there’s something drastic’ly wrong with us
as a nation. Because I- uh when you say, that the Federal
government cannot interfere,.hh in u-uh:: condoned murder.
Like you-
Crandall: [In a- in a- in a murder case⎯
Caller: [Like you mentioned in Mississippi
(Strauss 1993: ex. (12))
Strauss points out (1993: 410) that the use of the HIGH
DEIXIS/FOCUS expression this man in the first line of L 76, as fourth
mention of the referent involved, is not evoking ‘new information’, but is
rather motivated by the caller’s attempt to regain her turn, lost to Crandall
at line 71.
Another attested example (from my own corpus this time, here a news-
paper article) is given under (17):
(17) [Beginning of article “God sends a sign to the heathen in a Chevy”, The In-
dependent, 11 August 1999, p. 13]
You are driving along in the relaxed American way, just getting from A to
B and minding your own business, when your attention is grabbed by a gi-
gantic billboard, “That ‘Love Thy Neighbour’ Thing”, reads the neat, white
text, “I meant it – God”.