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Mexican güey – from vocative to discourse marker: a case of grammaticalization?

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... Four main semantic categories are susceptible to assume vocative functions in Spanish: (1) proper names (e.g., María); (2) titles (e.g., señor(a) 'sir/madam'); (3) nominal terms of address derived from common nouns and adjectives (e.g., guapa 'pretty one'); and (4) the secondperson pronouns (e.g., informal tú and formal usted 'you') (Kleinknecht 2013). In spoken Spanish, the category of nominal terms of address is the most productive one in terms of both token and type frequency (Cuenca 2004). ...
... vecino 'neighbor'); and (3) invectives (e.g., cabrón 'asshole') (Kleinknecht 2013). ...
... Interestingly, terms of endearment are typically associated with women's attenuated and friendly speech style, whereas men and adolescents predominantly resort to familiarizers or invectives as an outlet of coolness and (male) solidarity (Kleinknecht 2013). ...
Article
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The present study aims to examine the socio-pragmatic scope of vocatives in present-day colloquial Spanish. As prototypical deictic markers, directly calling upon the addressee, vocatives are considered crucial mechanisms in the creation and maintaining of interpersonal relationships during interaction. This deictic potential makes them highly appropriate strategies at the service of face work and (im)politeness. However, the relation between (Spanish) vocatives and (im)politeness has scarcely been explored. In an attempt to fill this research gap, the present analysis empirically examines the socio-pragmatic functions related to the expression of (im)politeness that the Spanish vocative is able to fulfill in colloquial conversations. The results show that its socio-pragmatic multifunctionality needs to be evaluated in the broad context, not only by taking into account the hosting speech act and the vocative’s semantic features, but also extra-linguistic parameters, such as the interpersonal relationship and the speaker’s age.
... Los denominados marcadores de control de contacto (Briz Gómez 1998: 224-229), enfocadores de alteridad (Portolés Lázaro 1998: 144-145;Martín Zorraquino/Portolés Lázaro 1999: 4171-4190), conectores ordenadores del discurso interactivos (y continuativos) (Fuentes Rodríguez 2009) o marcadores apelativos (Llopis Cardona/Montañez Mesas 2019) son expresiones -originalmente-apelativas cuya tarea principal estriba en establecer y controlar la relación entre los participantes de la conversación y han merecido un buen número de estudios monográficos, de carácter global o concentrados en variedades sociales o dialectales del español, sobre unidades como hombre (y mujer), hijo, chico, tío, huevón o güey (Portolés Lázaro/Vázquez Orta 2000;Cuenca/Torres Vilatarsana 2008;Briz Gómez 2012;Fuentes Rodríguez 2009;Jørgensen 2008;Gaviño Rodríguez 2011;De Latte/Enghels 2019;Helinks 2015;Kleinknecht 2013). La génesis y diacronía de estas partículas no ha concitado, en cambio, el mismo interés. ...
... El mecanismo de la cooptación es, por tanto, instantáneo, mientras la gramaticalización se define por su gradualidad. En consonancia con la propuesta de Heine (2018), el surgimiento de los marcadores pragmáticos 22 requiere de dos procesos diferenciados, el de gramaticalización y el de la cooptación, y no necesita de la introducción de nuevos términos, como, por ejemplo, los de rutinización sugerido por Kleinknecht (2013) o pragmaticalización aplicado por Heyd (2014). ...
... Loporcaro y Faraoni (2021: 580) ponen en juego estos términos del órganon de Bühler. 3 Para esta caracterización seguimos principalmente a BañónHernández (1993), Alonso-Cortés Manteca (1999),Mazzoleni (1995, 2011), Cuenca (2004, Edeso Natalías(2005), NGLE ( § 32.5),Kleinknecht (2013), Moreno Benítez (2019) y GónzalezLópez (2020). ...
... This structural isolation is usually marked by pauses in spoken language. Their extra-predicative status explains why vocatives display a high degree of distributional freedom, operating in the left or right periphery of an utterance, in the middle of an utterance, or even independently (Kleinknecht 2013). As regards the linguistic expressions susceptible to assume vocative functions, four main lexical categories can be distinguished in Spanish: (1) proper names (e.g., Martín); (2) titles (e.g., señor 'sir'); (3) nominal terms of address (e.g., guapa 'pretty one'); and (4) second-person pronouns (e.g., tú 'you') (Kleinknecht 2013). ...
... Their extra-predicative status explains why vocatives display a high degree of distributional freedom, operating in the left or right periphery of an utterance, in the middle of an utterance, or even independently (Kleinknecht 2013). As regards the linguistic expressions susceptible to assume vocative functions, four main lexical categories can be distinguished in Spanish: (1) proper names (e.g., Martín); (2) titles (e.g., señor 'sir'); (3) nominal terms of address (e.g., guapa 'pretty one'); and (4) second-person pronouns (e.g., tú 'you') (Kleinknecht 2013). Interestingly, in spoken Spanish, the category of nominal terms of address is used most frequently (Brandimonte 2011). ...
... Interestingly, in spoken Spanish, the category of nominal terms of address is used most frequently (Brandimonte 2011). Looking at the semantic-pragmatic features of these vocative expressions, we can distinguish the following types: (1) vocatives denoting a certain property of the listener (e.g., age: joven 'youngster'; profession: profe 'teacher'; gender: hombre/mujer 'man/woman'); (2) vocatives describing a relationship between the interlocutors: (a) the so-called familiarizers expressing solidarity and trust (e.g., tronco/a 'dude'; tío/a 'dude'); (b) terms of endearment expressing an intimate, affective relationship (e.g., cariño 'darling'; amor 'love'); (c) kinship terms (e.g., mamá/papá 'mum/dad'); and (d) other types of relationships (e.g., vecino 'neighbor') (Braun 1988;Kleinknecht 2013). ...
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In recent decades, youth language has become one of the preferred research areas in sociolinguistics, not only because of its non-normative nature but mostly because it is recognized as a catalyst for language change. Since adolescents aspire to create and safeguard an in-group identity, they constantly generate innovative linguistic forms. However, few studies have empirically monitored the speed at which linguistic innovations are introduced into youth language. This study explores the speed and nature of recent language change within Spanish youth language by conducting a corpus analysis in real time. Data of the contemporary CORMA corpus (Corpus Oral de Madrid, compiled between 2016 and 2019) are contrasted with the highly comparable data of the COLAm corpus (Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid, compiled between 2003 and 2007). The study scrutinizes two typical phenomena of youth language, namely the use of intensifiers (e.g., super-, mazo) and vocatives (e.g., tío/tía, chaval/chavala). It is shown that changes occur at a more moderate speed than previously assumed and that the speed of change depends on the linguistic phenomenon under study. Additionally, the data suggest that more neutral forms remain quite stable over time, while the use of more expressive items shrinks or increases faster.
... Ahora bien, el término vocativo refiere a los elementos lingüísticos mediante los cuales el hablante llama la atención del oyente al que va dirigido el mensaje (Bañón, 1993;Alonso-Cortés, 1999;Kleinknecht, 2013). La bibliografía disponible al respecto pone en evidencia que el vocativo define inevitablemente la relación social existente entre los interactantes (Zwicky, 1974;Alonso-Cortés, 1999;Cuenca, 2004). ...
... Como el vocativo constituye una de las señales explícitas de la presencia del interlocutor en el texto, es incontestable que la comunicación oral, que suele ubicar al hablante y al oyente en un contexto comunicativo común, impulsa el uso de las expresiones vocativas, a diferencia de la comunciación escrita, marcada por una distancia espacio-temporal entre los participantes (Kleinknecht, 2013). Sin embargo, son muy escasos los estudios dedicados al uso del vocativo en el lenguaje oral, de acuerdo con el general desinterés por los fenómenos asociados a la modadidad oral de la lengua (Bañon, 1993;Kleinknecht, 2013). ...
... Como el vocativo constituye una de las señales explícitas de la presencia del interlocutor en el texto, es incontestable que la comunicación oral, que suele ubicar al hablante y al oyente en un contexto comunicativo común, impulsa el uso de las expresiones vocativas, a diferencia de la comunciación escrita, marcada por una distancia espacio-temporal entre los participantes (Kleinknecht, 2013). Sin embargo, son muy escasos los estudios dedicados al uso del vocativo en el lenguaje oral, de acuerdo con el general desinterés por los fenómenos asociados a la modadidad oral de la lengua (Bañon, 1993;Kleinknecht, 2013). ...
Thesis
This Master's dissertation focuses on the formal, functional and sociolinguistic variation of vocatives in the Spanish of Madrid, on the basis of empirical corpus data. You can download the file from: https://lib.ugent.be/catalog/rug01:002349216
... No obstante, a esta función básica se suman varios otros usos discursivos, determinados por el contexto (Edeso Natalías, 2005). Por tanto, el vocativo se define como una categoría polifuncional, o mejor dicho, como una macrofunción lingüística (Bañón, 1993;Cuenca, 2004;Edeso Natalías, 2005;Kleinknecht, 2013). Desde el punto de vista sintáctico, el vocativo se suele analizar como elemento extrapredicativo. ...
... Varios autores han puesto en evidencia que el estudio del vocativo debe realizarse a partir de muestras de la comunicación oral, puesto que suele ubicar al hablante y al oyente en un contexto comunicativo común. Está claro que esta copresencia del hablante y del oyente impulsa el uso de las expresiones vocativas, a diferencia de la comunicación escrita, marcada por una distancia espacio-temporal entre los participantes (Cuenca, 2004;Jørgenson, 2013;Kleinknecht, 2013). Se ha escogido estudiar la variedad capitalina dado que, gracias al prestigio del que suele gozar la lengua de la capital, se asume que las metrópolis constituyen los principales propulsores del cambio lingüístico, de donde tienden a difundirse las innovaciones lingüísticas hacia la periferia (Jørgenson, 2013). ...
... Resultan especialmente productivos en el registro coloquial los vocativos que expresan una relación solidaria y/o afectiva entre los interlocutores como guapo, mi amor, mi cielo, amigo etc. (Alonso-Cortés, 1999;Edeso Natalías, 2005;Kleinknecht, 2013). Igualmente, los vocativos que refieren a la edad del oyente pueden perder su valor referencial cuando se dirigen a un interlocutor adulto. ...
Article
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This paper investigates the formal and functional variation of the vocative in contemporary Spanish teenage talk. For this purpose, all vocative occurrences found in conversations between teenagers in the Corpus Oral de Madrid-2016 are analyzed. The vocative is known to be highly productive in Spanish teenage talk, on both formal and functional levels. First, we provide the inventory of vocative forms used by Madrilenian teenagers, examine their origin and describe their semantic-pragmatic features, with special attention for the nominal vocative expressions used as symbols of in-group identity. The second part disentangles the pragmatic-discursive functions assumed by these forms, by taking into account the vocative’s multifunctionality. Teenagers tend to use vocatives as a phatic mechanism which allows them to control the contact with their interlocutor(s).
... Sintácticamente funcionan como complementos periféricos entre pausas, formando grupo entonativo independiente (Alonso-Cortés, 1999;Fuentes Rodríguez, 2007). Según Kleinknecht (2013), son muy frecuentes en español, fuera de la estructura clausal. La oración «host» no incluye en su estructura verbal estos elementos que apuntan al receptor al que se dirige el hablante. ...
... En nuestro corpus encontramos elementos identificativos cuando se refieren a los cargos (los que hemos denominado neutros) y predicativos cuando son positivos o negativos. Kleinknecht (2013) habla de función intensificadora cuando el vocativo se emplea para resaltar el contenido de lo dicho o el valor ilocutivo del enunciado. En estos casos lo apelativo no desaparece, sino que se relega a un segundo plano. ...
Article
El presente trabajo consiste en un estudio lingüístico-pragmático de los mensajes de twitter de políticos españoles, hombres y mujeres, para descubrir cómo se construye y deconstruye la imagen de un personaje público a través de los comentarios de los ciudadanos. En ellos se recogen sus valoraciones sobre el político y su gestión, y a la vez, se proyectan públicamente afectando a la imagen del candidato. Nos detenemos en los vocativos empleados mostrando, desde este enfoque integrado, no solo su función sintáctica y su valor básicamente apelativo sino también su comportamiento sociopragmático como herramienta para definir la relación interactiva con el aludido y formar una identidad generalmente negativa sobre el personaje público. Los vocativos documentados recurren frecuentemente a ataques ad hominem basados en su personalidad o en el rol que desempeñan. Son constantes las acusaciones de mentir, falsear, robar o no cumplir con sus obligaciones, aparte de otros insultos más personales. Las valoraciones positivas son menos frecuentes. El estudio contrasta los resultados según el género de la persona a la que se dirige el vocativo.
... Se suele asumir que su función prototípica consiste en llamar la atención del oyente al que va dirigido el mensaje. Sin embargo, como será mostrado en este artículo, a esta función de apelación se suman varias otras, determinadas por el contexto (Bañón 1993, Cuenca 2004, Edeso Natalías 2005, Kleinknecht 2013). Sintácticamente, el vocativo tiene carácter extrapredicativo (Alonso-Cortés 1999). ...
... Luego, según Kleinknecht (2013), el vocativo constituye una herramienta útil para poner de relieve el valor ilocutivo o partes de la estructura informativa del enunciado. La autora especifica que la función de llamar o reforzar la atención del oyente puede ser reinterpretada como estrategia de aporte enfático. ...
Chapter
The central aim of this paper is to examine the formal, functional and sociolinguistic variation of the vocative in contemporary Madrilenian Spanish. For this purpose, vocative occurrences found in spontaneous conversations between Madrilenian speakers in the Corpus Oral de Madrid-2016 are analyzed. The vocative is considered a strikingly productive category in Spanish, in terms of both its token frequency and type productivity. Given this highly productive character of the Spanish vocative, this study pursues three main objectives. The first part aims to uncover the vocative's formal and functional scope. To do so, we provide the inventory of vocative forms used in the corpus, examine their origin and describe their semantic-pragmatic features. Additionally, we intend to disentangle the pragmatic-discursive functions assumed by these forms, by taking into account the vocative’s multifunctionality. The second part aims to shed light on the sociolinguistic distribution of the vocative’s linguistic variability. Therefore, the vocative's linguistic variation (form/function) will be scrutinized in light of the speakers' sociolinguistic profile (gender/age).
... The frequency of address terms varies across languages. They are, for example, particularly frequent in Spanish (Kleinknecht 2013). Using a corpus-based approach to compare their use in British and American English conversation, Leech (1999) found familiarizers to be more frequent in American English, noting that British English relies more on kinship terms. ...
Article
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This corpus linguistics study offers a diachronic perspective on masculine and feminine address terms by analyzing the frequencies of the pairs “dude”/”dudette” and “bro”/”sis” in the 325 million-word TV Corpus. Results show an increase of the frequency of “dude” and “bro”, a quasi-absence of “dudette”, and a stable but low frequency of “sis”. They suggest that “dude” and “bro” have taken on generic meanings, while the usage of “sis” remains kinship-specific. They also show that familiarizers are more frequent in American English than in British and Canadian English, and that their frequency in the TV Corpus is genre-dependent, with animated series and reality television shows being more conducive to their use.
... Alanyazına büyük ölçüde yön veren çalışmalara dayalı olarak, hitap ifadelerinin daha çok anlambilim, toplumdilbilim ve edimbilimsel çerçevede incelendiği söylenebilir (Brown ve Gilman, 1960); (Ervin Trip, 1972); (Lambert ve Tucker, 1976); (Kroger, Wood, ve Kim, 1984); (Braun, 1998) ve (Dickey, 1997). Hitap ifadelerine ilişkin pek çok farklı sınıflama önerisine ulaşmak mümkündür (Mehrotra,1981); (Chaika,1982); (Braun,1988); (Dunkling, 1990); (Fitch,1998); (Aliakbari ve Toni, 2008); (Kleinknecht, 2013) gibi. ...
Article
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Türk kültürü gibi toplumcu (İng. collectivist) kültürlerin toplumun her bir üyesini kendilerine özgü özellikleri bakımından bir diğer üyeden ayırma eğiliminde oldukları bilinmektedir (Hofstede, 1994). Bu kültürel eğilimin bir yansıması olarak Türkçe geniş bir hitap ifadeleri dizgesine sahiptir. Türkçedeki çeşitlilikleri ve günlük dildeki kullanım sıklıkları hitap ifadelerinin önemli bir çalışma alanı olarak betimlenmesini gerekli kılmaktadır (bknz. Gao, 2014, s. 2615; Clayman, 2010, s. 162). Derlem temelli bu çalışma, Türkçede yer alan hitap ifadelerini ve biçimbilimsel çeşitlemelerini saptamayı ve bu ifadeleri sınıflamayı hedeflemektedir. TNCv.3.0 üzerinden elde edilen veri temelinde yürütülen bu çalışmada hitap ifadeleri çoklu ortamlardan da yararlanılarak derlenmiş ve kapsamlı bir hitap ifadeleri veritabanı kullanılmıştır . Hitap ifadelerinin sınıflandırılması için Braun (1988) ve Dunkling’in (1990) önerileri Türkçeye uyarlanmıştır. Alanyazındaki sınıflamalara koşut biçimde Türkçe hitap ifadeleri sözcük türü açısından adıl hitap ifadeleri (sen ve siz) ve ad hitap ifadeleri olarak ikiye ayrılmış, ad hitap ifadeleri (sevgi sözcükleri, unvanlar, akrabalık terimleri, sözde akrabalık terimleri, saygı bildiren hitaplar, yakınlık bildiren hitaplar, olumsuzluk bildiren hitaplar biçiminde yedi grupta incelenmiştir. Çalışmada her bir hitap alt ulamının ayırıcı özellikleri kullanım örnekleriyle birlikte sunulmuştur. Türkçe hitap ifadelerini geniş bir bakış açısıyla ele alarak dizgeyi betimlemeyi amaçlayan bu çalışmanın, uygulamada anadil ve yabancı dil eğitimi, çeviri, sözlükçülük, doğal dil işleme dışında dilbilim dışı alanlara da katkıda bulunabileceği öngörülmektedir.
... Güey is a phonetic evolution from the noun buey (literally 'ox' , 'castrated bull') [bwej] > [gwej], integrated perfectly into the noun.cxn. According to Kleinknecht (2013), a metaphorical pre-constructional change occurred around 1970, whereby ox-like qualities such as stupidity, brutality or ignorance were transferred to humans, as occurred with macho (see Section 3.2). With this new negative meaning, güey is found in clause-integrated positions, as in Example (14). ...
Article
This paper explores novel ways to consider semantic–pragmatic cycles using a dual strategy: an inwards strategy, whereby the distinctive traits of a pragmatic cycle are established, and an outwards strategy, whereby the categories that delimit semantic–pragmatic cycles are described. The result of this exploration is the distinction between “pragmatic cycle”, “replication”, “concomitance” and “paradigmatic increase” as four different yet related processes. In addition, this study integrates Construction Grammar into the description of each process and shows that the study of semantic–pragmatic cycles can benefit from a constructional approach, adopting Traugott and Trousdale’s (2013) and Traugott’s (2018) models, and including concepts from European structuralism, particularly the notions of “paradigm”, “diasystem” and “functional language” (“lengua funcional”).
... In this section we review the sociolinguistic studies of masculine nominal vocatives to date (Alba-Juez 2009;Formentelli 2007;Kiesling 2004;Palacios 2002;Rendle-Short 2009, 2010. Work that focuses primarily on the semantic and pragmatic bleaching of these forms (Gaviño Rodríguez 2011;Kleinknecht 2013;McCready 2008;Rojas 2012), while interesting, is not applicable to the current study, and will therefore not be considered. ...
Chapter
Research shows that brocatives (masculine nominal vocatives) such as dude, mate or güey are being used by and towards females to express solidarity. This apparent-time study presents the results of a self-report survey adapted from Kiesling (2004) on the use of man, dude, bro, and brah [brʌ] /bruh [brə:] in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Our analysis considers social and identity variables (i.e. age, speaker and addressee gender, education, ethnicity, drug use, and alcohol consumption), as well as the degree of familiarity between speaker and addressee. Findings confirm the solidarity and closeness attributed to brocatives, their higher frequency in male-directed dyads, and the gender neutrality. indexed by dude. The use of man and bro is positively correlated with males, while bro and brah/bruh are associated with younger participants, and brah/bruh with younger non-Caucasian participants.
... If one adopts the standard assumption that vocative particles are optional across languages (see, e.g., Espinal, 2013, p. 112;Haegeman, 2014;Hill, 2014;Janson, 2013;Kasher, 2013;Kleinknecht, 2013;Lambrecht, 1996;Stavrou, 2013;Sonnenhauser & Hanna, 2013;Zwicky, 1974), this optionality supports the "referring" feature of vocativized nominals. The fact that a nominal constituent can be vocativized without the need of a vocative particle is indicative evidence that vocativized nominals are similar to aboutness topics. ...
Article
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Vocative expressions have been neglected in linguistic inquiry until very recently. This article provides a novel approach to the study of vocatives based on correlating the syntax and discourse at the interface. Syntactically, we provide empirical evidence that vocatives are visible to syntactic computation, belong to the C-domain, and discoursally perform a performative “at-issue” content/meaning exactly like aboutness topics (A-topics), based on a common selective property of both constituents. They select from a set of available things/people an entity the sentence is about, and are linked to the T-domain via coreferentiality between the vocativized A-topic and the thematic subject of imperatives, i.e., pro, thus correlating both components of the grammar at the interface.
... Spanish: Ø Chile: huevón 'stupid' (Rojas 2012, Helincks 2013 Ø Spain: hombre (mujer) 'man (woman)' (Gaviño Rodríguez 2011), tío/tía 'uncle/aunt', macho 'male' (Alba-Juez 2009) Ø Mexico: cabrón/ca' 'asshole', güey 'ox' (Palacios 2002, Nava Sanchezllanes 2006, Kleinknecht 2013 What are vocatives? (2) buey/güey 'stupid' ...
Conference Paper
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In many languages, one can find pragmatic markers (PM) and discourse markers (DM) that originate from vocatives, i.e. nominal expressions used as direct, free address forms. Cases in point are the words mate, man, dude in English (Heyd 2013, Kiesling 2004, Rendle-Short 2010), alter, mann in German (Heyd 2013, Souza 2013), hombre/mujer, tío/tía, huevón, güey, ca‘/cabrón (Gaviño Rodríguez 2011, Helincks 2013, Palacios 2002, Rojas 2012, Kleinknecht 2013) in several varieties of Spanish. All those expressions have in common that in the majority of their ocurrences in everyday interaction they cannot be analyzed as vocatives anymore. While vocatives can assume different functions in discourse (relational functions, attention getting functions, emphatic and expressive functions), they always directly refer to the hearer. In contrast, the markers in question have lost that deictic second-person reference, and only function as relational, emphatic/expressive or discourse structuring elements. The aim of my contribution is to analyze how and why this development occurs. I will concentrate on one of the words mentioned above, namely Mexican Spanish güey, while constantly referring and comparing to other, similar expressions. While güey was originally an imprecation (buey ‘ox’), it was generalized as a ‘ritual insult’ (Labov 1972) in the speech of adolescent males in the 1980/90s, and consequently adopted as a marker of emphasis or expressivity by a wide range of the population. Nowadays, though, this expressive function has been ‘bleached’ through inflational overuse, and most of the ocurrences of güey have no other than a discourse marking function, delimiting turns or parts of an utterance. We can, therefore, observe a process of semantic bleaching during which the former insult loses first its imprecative meaning and then also the acceptation of ‘fellow male’, being used by female as well as by male speakers, while at the same time reducing and changing its functional range from interactional/relational to text-relevant functions. It will be shown that the outcomes of this process can be characterized as pragmatic and discourse markers. Still, the main focus lies on the question why vocatives qualify as a source category for PM/DM. It will be argued that there are some inherent qualities to vocatives that are preserved throughout the whole process and that can also be found in other possible source categories, e.g. imperatives (Reisigl 1999).
Article
This article describes the vocative use of first names. The literature cites addressing a person by a given name as the preferential mode of politeness when the addressee's name is known to the speaker. The study aims to clarify this idea, demonstrating limitations on using first names imposed by the interactional context. It also seeks to examine the role of given names and terms of address in general from the perspective of linguistic politeness. The data used in the study consists of fragments of spontaneous interactions from the Russian Nation­al Corpus and native speakers' metapragmatic commentaries collected by the author. The methodology draws on Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's theory of linguistic polite­ness. The literature review and data analysis revealed two interactional contexts where ad­dressing by a given name is foregone or does not seem to be preferential despite the speaker's acquaintance with the corresponding term of identification: communication between family members and service encounters. For some pieces of data, a description framed in terms of linguistic politeness appears to be suitable. Yet, a first-name address can function as not only a mitigating device but also a potential face-threatening act. Finally, there are many instances where politeness issues do not seem relevant. In these cases, it seems appropriate to describe the vocative function as a background operation to maintain social relations.
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Resumen El presente artículo analiza la evolución diacrónica de dos vocablos de tratamiento familiar de notable frecuencia en el español de México cuyo origen designa animales. Su primera extensión semántica durante el siglo XIX es altamente ofensiva buey = “tonto”, cabrón = “rufián”. Este estudio ubica la emergencia de los valores pragmáticos de ambas formas alrededor de 1960 y reconoce su uso como representante de importantes cambios de orden social. Con base en la comparación de tres corpus orales de distintos grados de informalidad, el estudio rastrea la pérdida de rasgos fonémicos y semánticos de cada forma en favor de la emergencia de valores pragmáticos. Los procesos de erosión fonémica [buey] > [guéi] > [wei] > [we] // [kabrón] > [kabr ó n] > [kaón] son interpretados como reflejos de erosión semántica que llevan a la formación de formas de tratamiento cercano y que, a su vez, desarrollan valores de marcación discursiva siguiendo los pasos de un recurrente proceso de pragmaticalización.
Chapter
Language Change in the 20th Century: Exploring micro-diachronic evolutions in Romance languages examines the distinctive features that set the study of the 20th century apart from preceding periods. With a primary focus on Romance languages, including Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese, the book advocates for the adoption of innovative methodologies to enhance the nuanced retrieval of research data: the use of speaker’s attitudes questionnaires, apparent time constructions, and S-curves. Additionally, new materials are addressed as diachronic data sources: mass-media recordings from radio and TV, colloquial conversations, and sociolinguistic corpora. Results focus on the evolution of discourse markers, address terms, as well as on the influence of specific processes such as colloquialization or external mechanisms on the language changes developed during this period. In sum, the 20th century is presented in this book as a new strand in diachronic studies, rather than another time span.
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This article considers morphological forms of addressing and calling as vocative cases. The research is focused on previous cross-linguistic studies on the vocative case, theoretical backround of the vocative case, marking of the vocative case in languages, vocative syntax of languages and some issues of vocative syntax of Modern Mongolian. Theoretical part includes evolution of case systems, marking of cases in languages, morphological and prosodic forms of vocative cases. Although some Indo-European languages lost their vocative case forms, Baltic languages, Slavonic languages, Indo-Iranian languages of Indo- European family and Georgian language of Iberian-Caucasian family have vocative cases. At the end of the article addressing and calling forms in modern Mongolian are considered in the framework of vocative syntax. We agree that vocative cases in languages exist between system and performance.
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L’article vise à documenter le processus qui conduit certains noms d’humains généraux (NHG) vers un emploi de marqueur discursif. Ce type d’évolution, bien identifié dans d’autres langues, a été peu analysé en français. La difficulté tient tout autant aux unités manipulées (comme celle de marqueurs discursifs rarement reliés à des NHG), qu’aux cadres d’analyse (le recours à des paramètres phonologiques, morphologiques, syntaxiques et pragmatiques pas toujours faciles à préciser car multifonctionnels) ou à la multiplicité des facteurs à prendre en compte (les caractéristiques – de genre, de milieu, etc. – des locuteurs, leur proximité, les thèmes abordés dans les échanges, la position des termes dans l’énoncé, etc.).
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Addressing terms are mostly marked with positive emotions such as respect, closeness, solidarityand are defined as linguistic expressions that reinforce social relations in connection with politeness and face-saving (Leech, 1999; Wardaugh, 2000; Yang, 2010). The limited related literature on different languagespartially reflects the features of negative address terms (Adamovksy, 2017; Larkey, Hecht & Martin, 1993;Naylor, 1995; Palacios Martinez, 2021; Zhanfang, 2013). Turkish literature on the other hand, no previousstudy has investigated negative addressing terms on its own. According to Turkish Addressing TermsDatabase1, negative ones constitute 27% of the Turkish Addressing System and the frequency of addressingterms together with the gap in the literature makes it a need to conduct a study on the negative ones in Turkish.The present study obtains data firstly from TNC v3 (Aksan et al., 2016) consisting of the samples of textualand spoken data in Turkish and secondly an online questionnaire of 38 investigated items using GoogleFormsin order to reveal the pragmatic features of these linguistic expression. Additionally, ethical approval dated07/06/2021 and numbered 11 was obtained from Mersin University Ethics Committee. The results of the studyindicate that negative addressing terms can be divided into ten sub-classes. It is also detected that althoughnegative addressing terms are traditionally marked with impoliteness, insult, and face-threats, they can be usedwith the function of creating mini-cultures, showing intimacy, and fostering humor in Turkish as well .
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Se describe el uso de los tratamientos nominales en tres obras literarias mexicanas: dos novelas –Los bandidos de Río Frío (1892-1893), de Manuel Payno, y Los de abajo (1915-1920), de Mariano Azuela– y la versión teatral de Los albañiles (1969), de Vicente Leñero, en función de dos variables gramaticales (los sistemas de segunda persona y la categoría del núcleo del sintagma nominal correspondiente) y dos pragmáticas (la relación interpersonal del hablante con el referente del tratamiento nominal y la valoración que el primero atribuye al segundo). Se observa que el uso de los tratos nominales no sigue un patrón estable en función de estas variables, entre otros factores que intervienen en las situaciones comunicativas, y que es la variabilidad lo más común en el uso, inclusive de un mismo tipo de tratamiento nominal en el dinamismo dialógico. El análisis es descriptivo, de tipo cuantitativo y cualitativo.
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In spoken Spanish, a wide variety of vocative expressions is used to signal an affective, close relationship between the interlocutors. Within this paradigm of the so-called terms of endearment, aesthetic adjectives stand out as markers of affection and tenderness towards the interlocutor. The present study sheds light on the main formal and functional characteristics of the Spanish vocative guapo, derived from the aesthetic adjective, meaning ‘pretty, handsome’, in present-day Peninsular Spanish. The analysis is based on data from different oral Peninsular Spanish corpora. The results show that guapo is a multifunctional vocative, whose pragmatic-functional paradigm includes phatic-appellative, politeness and expressive-emphatic uses. However, guapo is preferably used as an intensifying politeness strategy, in order to boost or enhance the face of the interlocutor. Hence, it is claimed that the pragmatic properties of the vocative under scrutiny originate in the conceptual content of the lexical base, more specifically in the flattering value inherent to the meaning of aesthetic adjectives. Therefore, the vocative uses of guapo are presented as the result of a pragmaticalization process.
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Este artículo se ocupa del concepto de ciclicidad y de su aplicación a los cambios de índole pragmática. En la primera parte, se revisa el concepto de ciclo semántico-pragmático propuesto por Hansen (2014, 2018, 2020), se propone una redefinición y se caracteriza el ciclo a partir de una serie de rasgos básicos. En la segunda parte, se ilustra la propuesta con el estudio de un caso: el reemplazo de macho por tío en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Macho se utilizaba como vocativo desde al menos la década de los cincuenta; dos décadas más tarde, tío comenzó a emplearse como vocativo en contextos similares a macho, se popularizó entre los jóvenes hasta el punto de reemplazar en gran medida a macho; con el paso de los años se ha expandido al grupo etario medio –mejor dicho, estos hablantes han continuado utilizando tío/a–, de modo que se ha consolidado la tendencia dispar en la frecuencia de uso –creciente en tío/a, decreciente en macho– de la que resulta un cambio sin retorno, que permite hablar de ciclo semántico-pragmático.
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This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collected in this volume also discuss different factors at play in processes of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, which include contact-induced change and pragmatic borrowing, socio-interactional functional pressures and sociopragmatic indexicalities, constraints of cognitive processing, together with regularities in semantic change. Putting the traditional issues concerning the status, delimitation and categorization of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles somewhat off the stage, the eighteen articles collected in this volume deal instead with general questions concerning the development and use of such procedural elements, explored from different approaches, both formal and functional, and from a variety of perspectives – including corpus-based, sociolinguistic, and contrastive perspectives – and offering language-specific synchronic and diachronic studies.
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Vocatives play an important role for establishing and maintaining social contacts in human communication. Given the functional and formal diversity in their culture-specific realisation, this study, based on two spoken corpora of everyday conversations in Spanish and German, compares the use of different types of vocatives in these two languages, especially from a pragmatic and sociolinguistic point of view. Firstly, we present a brief review on the communicative functions of vocatives and describe the tertium comparationis, the methodology and the corpora used for this study. Then, we compare the frequency of Spanish and German vocatives in different conversational settings. What emerges is greater tendency to use vocatives in the Spanish data, especially for reinforcing social contact within the conversations. As far as the variation of vocative-forms is concerned, this contrastive analysis reveals different pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions of last-name-vocatives, endearment-terms and the use of the pronouns
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It has been recently suggested that the Argentinian conversational marker che is being replaced by another typical expression, boludo. The purpose of the present paper is to provide a pilot comparative study of these two Argentinian markers in order to examine their free interchangeability and to refute it eventually. A commutation test has been used as a basic tool to compare the behavior and functions of che and boludo and the results have helped to reveal contexts in which it would be inadmissible or inappropriate to employ boludo instead of che due to the possible violation of politeness norms. In the article, che and boludo are considered mainly from the sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches although some important cultural phenomena are discussed as well.
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Este artículo examina el uso de la forma de tratamiento chilena huevón en interacciones cotidianas. Huevón es uno de los vocativos más particulares del habla informal de Chile y se destaca tanto por su alta frecuencia como por la riqueza del campo derivacional del que forma parte. Además, la forma puede expresar significados tanto positivos como negativos. Basado en un amplio corpus de interacciones informales espontáneas, se analiza la influencia de parámetros lingüísticos (fonéticos, sintácticos, semánticos, pragmáticos) y extra-lingüísticos (sociales, relacionales, situacionales) en el uso de huevón y su valoración en relación con la cortesía. Los resultados indican que todas las generaciones y principalmente los hombres lo utilizan, en los ámbitos diarios más informales, sobre todo entre íntimos y en roles igualitarios. Contrariamente a lo que sugieren su semántica original y su estigma de rasgo maleducado, su uso raras veces pretende o efectúa descortesía.
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