Topics in Address Research
In all languages, forms of address establish an ever-changing repertoire with rules of usage that are closely tied to social and other factors; therefore, the study of address forms has been a central element of the relational turn of linguistics in the last decade. This book series aims to provide a platform for global research on address forms and their usage. The books in this series focus on the range of available terms of address (nominal, pronominal, other), their grammatical as well as pragmatic properties, the factors determining their use in actual discourse, the way they reflect as well as constitute social relations and the way they act as a means of organising communicative routines. Studies in this series will describe address in as wide a number of languages as possible in order to arrive at an overarching model of address intended to capture speaker-addressee-relations as an essential aspect of communication. The series publishes monographs and thematically coherent collective volumes, in the English language.
-
-
Address Variation in Sociocultural Context
More LessThis study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian—with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and power dynamics between waiters and customers in a wide range of restaurant types. This book marks the introduction of Italian to the field of regional pragmatic variation and it will be of interest to linguists, Italianists and researchers more broadly working on service encounters. The author offers a new dimension to the understanding of social interaction and language use in contemporary Italy, uncovering cultural and linguistic differences between even adjacent geographical areas within a modern European nation state.
-
-
-
It's different with you
More LessThis book is a collection of studies about forms of address in the world’s languages, with a focus on contrast and difference. The individual chapters highlight inter- and intralinguistic variation in the expression of address and its sociol-cultural functions across media, registers, geographical contexts and time – in more than 15 languages. The volume showcases the variety of approaches that exists in current address research, including the breadth of contrastive methodologies harnessing surveys and questionnaires, focus group discussions, corpus linguistics, discourse and conversation analysis to offer complementary perspectives on culture-specific address practice.
This volume is for students and researchers of address and social interaction in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, including various sub-disciplines of linguistics (such as contrastive, variational and intercultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and morphology) and intercultural communication, as well as experts in individual languages and qualitative sociologists.
-
-
-
It’s not all about you
More LessThe twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research, a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview, followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches, variation and change, address in digital and audiovisual media, nominal address, and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French, Czech, Dutch, English (from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada), Finnish, Italian, Mongolian, Palenquero Creole, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English, the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists, sociolinguists, typologists, and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.
-
-
-
The Mysterious Address Term anata 'you' in Japanese
More LessThe use of the second person singular pronoun anata ‘you’ in modern Japanese has long been regarded as mysterious and problematic, generating contradictory nuances such as polite, impolite, intimate, and distancing. Treated as a troublesome pronoun, scholars have searched for a semantically loaded meaning in anata, under the assumption that all Japanese personal reference terms involve social indexicality. This book takes a new approach, revealing that anata is in fact semantically simple and its powerful expressivity is explained only in pragmatic terms. In doing so, the study brings to bear a thorough understanding of key issues in pragmatics, such as common ground, sociocultural norms, and shared understandings, in order to fully grasp the meaning and usage of this single linguistic item. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of linguistic fields, such as semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, anthropological linguistics, linguistic typology, cultural linguistics, as well as applied linguistics.
-
-
-
Nominal and Pronominal Address in Jamaica and Trinidad
More LessThis book examines the various patterns of nominal and pronominal address used in Jamaica and Trinidad, the two most populous islands of the English-speaking Caribbean. Given that the Anglo-Caribbean context has so far been largely neglected in address research, this study aims to provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic means Jamaicans and Trinidadians have at their disposal and make use of to address each other. A particular focus will be on variation in the speakers’ address behaviour with regard to their sex, age, social class, ethnicity, and regional background. The study draws both on data from a self-compiled corpus of postcolonial Jamaican and Trinidadian literary works, and on questionnaire and interview data collected during fieldwork. This book contributes to the ever-growing body of research in the field of nominal and pronominal address, and will be relevant to researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and World Englishes.
-