Of persons

[alice]

What would be the correct linguistic name for a system of reference which refers to participants in a discourse not by the first/second/third/others system we're all used to, but by appearance in the discourse, so that if Alice speaks to Bob and Bob replies, Bob refers to himself not as "I" but as "second to speak", so to speak? Is this actually attested anywhere? Are there any other systems which order by, for example, status?

[mèþru]

I don't think that the first system exists, but I think that plenty of languages have speech styles in which people refer to themselves and the person they address by their status instead of names or pronouns, including English ("The Speaker recognizes the Representative from Illinois")

[zompist]

I don't know what the name is, but ASL is very close to this. You do have 'I' and 'you', but you can have as many third person pronouns as you like, by pointing to a position in the conceptual space in front of you. It's not numerical, but presumably people referred to early in the conversation get the 'easiest pointers'.

[xxx]

What would be the correct linguistic name for a system of reference which refers to participants in a discourse not by the first/second/third/others system we're all used to, but by appearance in the discourse, so that if Alice speaks to Bob and Bob replies, Bob refers to himself not as "I" but as "second to speak", so to speak? Is this actually attested anywhere? Are there any other systems which order by, for example, status?

Interesting, that was my way in conlanguistics until shortly (and I can always use it in absence of pronouns...)

[miekko]

I don't know what the name is, but ASL is very close to this. You do have 'I' and 'you', but you can have as many third person pronouns as you like, by pointing to a position in the conceptual space in front of you. It's not numerical, but presumably people referred to early in the conversation get the 'easiest pointers'.

Has any experiments been carried out to figure out how many such pronouns ASL speakers manage to keep track of reliably in a conversation? I would guess a native speaker's memory for such "pointers" is more well-trained than that of an average human being for comparable 'tasks', but there must be some cut-off somewhere, and also situations in which the reliability weakens (say, low blood glucose might weaken the reliability?)