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Project

Language change, cultural change? Social deixis through nominal and pronominal address in the history of English

Address terms constitute a core resource for realizing social deixis. Because of address terms' prominent social function, changes in address systems are often attributed to cultural changes (e.g. recent changes in address between children and parents may reflect changing parent-child relationships). However, these explanations have rarely been tested on a systematic basis. Cultural explanations of changes in address usage are most convincing if not just a single address term but the entire address system is affected. Therefore, the general aim of this project is to develop a corpus-based method to comprehensively describe changing address term usage, and to use the method to assess the impact of (alleged) major cultural changes on address usage.

A corpus of comedies will be collected for Recent English (1890-present day) and Early Modern English (1550-1750). Address usage will be annotated exhaustively, along with the different types of speaker-hearer relationships. From this, functional profiles are derived for individual address terms. In turn, these will be a basis for several derived measures. Using these, the impact of three cultural changes will be tested on the English address system: increased social equality and gender equality in the 20th century; and increased social mobility in the Early Modern period.

 

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  31 Dec 2021
Keywords:Linguistics, English, Address terms
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies
Project type:PhD project