CONSTRUCTION & MAINTENANCE OF SOCIAL RELATIONS WITH FAMILIAR TERMS OF ADDRESS
Keywords:
social relation, imbalance, Familiar, interlocutors, Construction & Maintenance of Social Relation.Abstract
This study endeavors to divulge that familiar terms of address, in addition to their attention/identifying function, have other functions, mainly initiating and maintaining interpersonal relationship between the interlocutors, i.e. a social function. Familiar terms of address, or direct address, comprise first names and terms of endearment. Relevant to this are the context and position in which familiar terms of address occur. A context may lead to a break in the social relation or is characterized by a temporary suspension of equilibrium between the interlocutors, thus, familiar terms of address are used in order to assuage this imbalance. Familiar terms of address can initiate and maintain social relations signaling an interpersonal functions such as anticipating a relationship trouble, tag-positioned terms of address in closing sequences in interaction; first names and terms of endearment are also indicative of the kind of the relationship the interlocutors have or they (these terms) renegotiate an already existent relationship among the interlocutors particularly intimates; maintenance of solidarity and bonding; terms of direct address serve as positive politeness strategies in the contexts of face-threatening acts to accomplish redress, i.e. serving as politic behavior and mitigators. There is, however, no one-to-one relationship between the terms of direct address and their functions: due to their multivalence, a first name or an endearment term can display disrespect or offence in lieu of having an identification/summoning or even endearing function especially in confrontational situations. This paper not only contributes to the linguistic studies, but also to discourse and pragma-linguistic analysis, relational communication, and media studies (e.g. utilizing TV drama as a corpus for analysis.
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