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Mummy’s very cross with you
(cf. Chapter 5, p. 126), this deviance
is not reproduced by the children. Functionally, Durkin
et al.
(1982) found that
mothers used the child’s name for attention orienting purposes and also to instruct
the child to act. Conti-Ramsden (1989) also notes an instruction to act function but
in play situations in relation to the mothers of language-impaired children. In
178
addition, these mothers used vocatives to request information. On the other hand,
mothers of non-language-impaired children mainly used vocatives for approval. The
role of the adult in influencing and informing a child’s vocative choice will be more
fully explored here in Section 7.5.
Wilson and Zeitlyn (1995) use a corpus of family discourse (four of the participants
were members of the family, one, a visitor, was on familiar terms) to demonstrate
that a range of socio-pragmatic features affect the choice of what they termed
Person-Referring Expressions (PREs).
1
Of direct relevance to the present study is the
finding that parents use first names to address their children and receive kin terms.
They also illustrated how the more socially distant participant, in this case the
visitor, is less often addressed by name or pronoun than family members and that the
visitor does not address the parents (accorded a higher social status than the visitor
in the study) by name at all. In examining vocative function, they noted how
vocatives were present in 27.5% of utterances that initiated topic change, whereas
15.8% of utterances that did not initiate topic change contained vocatives.
Cross-cultural studies outline the critical importance of language and culture in
determining choice of vocative. In an analysis of Korean and American address
terms, Hwang (1991) illustrates how Korean is an Object-Verb language, therefore it
uses the family name (
Clancy
) before our given name (
Brian
), whereas English, a
Verb-Object language, uses the opposite order. However, Hwang demonstrates that
choice is not just syntactically motivated, cultural values are also reflected in our use
of address terms. It is claimed that in traditional Korean society, there is a tendency
to put the group, family and country before the individual, resulting in the family
name appearing before the individual’s given name. However, in American society,
where the individual is perhaps more important, the given name appears first. The
prevalence of, and apparent preference for, the use of first names in American
society was noted by Hook (1984) who observes that ‘in America the solidarity
semantic of first name calling seems to be growing’ (p.186). Furthermore, Leech
(1999) demonstrates that the use of vocatives is approximately 25% more frequent in
American English than in British English. Bargiela
et al
. (2002: paragraph 9) label
1
Wilson and Zeitlyn (1995) class as vocatives all PREs that refer to the addressee including names,
pronouns, titles and kin terms.
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first name vocatives as ‘involvement strategies’ (Scollon and Scollon, 1995),
claiming that:
Most British and American people of a particular age range (i.e. under around 40-
50 years of age) in initial encounters insist on first names being used as quickly as
possible, whether the interaction is between relative equals or those in a
hierarchical relation.
They claim that in cross-cultural encounters, this can signal a disregard for or
misunderstanding of other cultures pragmatic interactional rules suggesting that
intercultural communication requires considerable thoughtfulness from both
addresser and addressee (see also Jaworski, 1992).
Zwicky (1974) suggests that vocatives have at least two functions;
calls
function to
summon the addressee’s attention and
addresses
are used to maintain or emphasise
the contact between speaker and addressee. In a comparison of British and American
English, Leech (1999) assigns vocatives three pragmatic functions: summoning
attention, addressee identification and the establishment or maintenance of a social
relationship between speaker and addressee(s). Interestingly for this study, he
suggests that vocatives do not occur among what he terms ‘close associates’ (p.
117), which include mother-daughter and wife-husband interactions. However, these
conversations where no vocatives are used occur in exchanges with only two
speakers and not multi-party dialogues. Subsequently, McCarthy and O’Keeffe
(2003), also working within the field of corpus linguistics, compared casual
conversation among family and friends (from the CANCODE corpus) to a 55,000
word corpus of radio phone-in calls and found that there was a higher overall
vocative use in casual conversation. This, they claim, is indicative of symmetric
speaker relations and a wider spoken genre range that are present in casual
conversation. They developed and expanded Leech’s (1999) functional categories as
Table 7.3 demonstrates:
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