Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 495

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Grammaticalisation of social distance marking – the sociolinguistic foundation of a linguistic typology of address pronouns in Europe, past and present.

Authors: Kretzenbacher, Heinz L.; Hajek, John; Lagerberg, Robert
Submitted by: Kretzenbacher, Heinz L. (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

The appropriate use of address pronouns is an essential pragmatic practice that immediately governs interpersonal relations in many languages of Europe (cf. Clyne, Norrby & Warren 2009), although it remains completely unknown to date for how many exactly this is the case. In English, only one pronoun ‘you’ is available in all contexts, whether one is speaking to one or more interlocutors, and the appropriate social distance between interlocutors must be signalled by other means such as first names/surnames, greetings, register etc. In other languages, speakers have to decide which is the appropriate address pronoun for a particular (set of) interlocutor(s).

Even where address pronoun systems are identified in grammars for specific languages, they are often not fully accurate by overlooking forms, e.g. the little known use of oni ‘they’, calqued on German Sie, for very formal address to one person in Slovene and Czech (and possibly other Slavic languages), alongside the more typically presented informal ti and formal vi pronouns (equivalent to French tu and vous respectively).

The paper reports on the project of the first detailed typological survey and analysis of address pronouns across Europe – from Iceland to the Caucasus, focussing not only on identifying the forms used, but also their pragmatic use, historical sources, shared features across areo-genetic space, and their synchronic grammatical properties.

According to some estimates, more than 200 languages are spoken in Europe today. While (some) European languages are the best studied of the world’s languages, we have only begun to make inroads (cf. Schüpbach et al. 2007) in research in what address forms are used nor how across this important linguistic area where a number of unrelated language families (as well as multiple branches in most) are found, such as Indo-European, Uralic, Basque, Semitic, Altaic. Given the longstanding contact between the many members of each family, it can be expected that we will find large areas of areal patterning with respect to address pronoun systems (as foreshadowed in a cursory study of 56 languages by Helmbrecht 2006), as well as their sources, use and grammatical characteristics. In addition, given massive social changes since WW2, urbanization and the increasing integration of Europe, we might also expect increasing signs of convergence in use of address pronouns, although both hypotheses remain to be tested and confirmed.

References:

Clyne, M., C. Norrby & J. Warren. 2009. Language and human relations. Cambridge: CUP.

Helmbrecht, J. 2006. Typologie und Diffusion von Höflichkeitspronomina in Europa. Folia Linguistica 39.3-4, 417-452.

Schüpbach, D., J. Hajek, J. Warren, M. Clyne, H.L. Kretzenbacher & C. Norrby. 2007. A cross-linguistic comparison of address pronoun use in four European languages: Intralingual and interlingual dimensions. In I. Mushin and M. Laughren (eds.). Selected papers from the 2006 annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society, Brisbane:University ofQueensland, 1-12.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Grammaticalisation of social distance marking – the sociolinguistic foundation of a linguistic typology of address pronouns in Europe, past and present.