Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2004

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Languages, Literatures and Linguistics

First Advisor

Leslie Barratt

Second Advisor

Betty Phillips

Third Advisor

Cecil Nelson

Abstract

In their research on pronouns of address in German, French, Italian and Spanish, Brown and Gilman (1960) collected data indicating that these four languages used two levels of pronouns of address (formal and informal) governed by two social semantics (power and solidarity). Further research on American English (Brown and Ford 1961; Slobin 1968; Ervin-Tripp 1972), Italian (Bates and Benigni 197 5), French and Spanish (Lambert and Tucker 1976) and Greek and Latin (Dickey 1996; 2002) confirmed Brown and Gilman's (1960) conclusions. Lambert and Tucker (1976), however, argued that the dual semantic model proposed by Brown and Gilman (1960) was too simple and could not describe the complete range of interactions that characterize human social relations. Data collected on Hindi (of the Indo-European group) and Javanese (of the Austronesian group) indeed indicates that address systems in these two languages are more complex than those in the European languages studied by Brown and Gilman. The Hindi language has three levels of second-person pronouns, while Javanese uses honorifics in addition to second-person pronouns (Geertz 1960). More recent research on forms of address has included both European and Asian languages: Polish (Kielkiewicz-Janowiak 1992) Turkish (Ba~oglu 1987) Egyptian Arabic (Parkinson 1985) and Korean (Hwang 1975) Their research data seemed to distinguish a marked difference in complexity between European and Asian languages concerning the use of address forms, but the research has been incomplete, and no decisive conclusions have been drawn that would establish that the forms of address usage is characteristic to particular language groups or language structures. The variation in the use of forms of address seems to be rather language-specific, and may be due to the particular circumstances in which each language evolved. While it is obvious that in the Hindi and Javanese languages the use of forms of address and honorifics are a lot more elaborate than in the European languages investigated by Brown and Gilman (1960), there are also European languages with forms of address and usage that are much more complicated than those in German, French, Italian and Spanish. Among those languages is Romanian, which belongs to the Romance group. Limited research has been done on address forms in Romanian and no significant data has been collected on these forms. This thesis endeavors to eliminate the research gap and provide data demonstrating that Romanian uses a form of address structure that covers four levels of formality (neutral, informal, formal and very formal) and three semantic parameters (neutrality, solidarity and power).

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