1 First-Person Reference in Discourse: Aims and Strategies 1 Journal of Pragmatics, special issue ‘Focus on the Speaker’ Kasia M. Jaszczolt University of Cambridge 1. Introduction ‘Focus on the Speaker’ is a pertinent subject in the debates on discourse processing at the present moment, largely as a result of the availability of two major orientations concerning utterance meaning: the one that has remained close to Grice’s original idea of meaning being intention-driven, and the one according to which meaning is better explained as the result of the addressee’s inference from what has been uttered and in what circumstances. Nevertheless, my contribution to the topic cuts across this Speaker Meaning/Addressee Meaning divide. In what follows, I focus on the first-person reference as applied in conversation, addressing the question of the meaning of markers of first-person reference, the most typical of which is the first-person pronoun such as the English ‘I’. I assess the viability of applying the rigid indexical/non-indexical distinction to such markers, briefly discuss universal and culture-specific aspects to self-referring and, next, focusing on English, ask the question as to whether the English language has devices that are used uniquely and unambiguously for conveying self-reference in the most common sense, that of conveying ‘cognitive access to oneself’ (Chierchia 1989). The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 presents the cross-linguistic diversity of ways of self-referring and poses some questions for semantic and pragmatic theory that ensue from this diversity. Section 3 focuses on the various uses of the first-person singular pronoun ‘I’ on the one hand, and, on the other, on ways of self-referring in English