A Case of Membership Categorization: The ‘Korean Male’

Abstract

Studies employing MCA often explore how people claim membership or non-membership in specific categories. Bateman (2012), for example, examines children’s use of collective pro-terms in establishing and protecting exclusive dyadic friendships. Lerner and Kitzinger (2007), focusing on repair of self-references, found that speakers switched the reference form from individual (e.g., ‘I’) to collective (e.g., ‘we’) when aggregating themselves to the collectivity; they changed the reference form from collective to individual when extracting themselves from the collectivity.