The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances

Fleming, Luke; Slotta, James D.

doi:10.1111/josl.12304

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Lastly, we found that more borrowings take place in affinal kin categories and in categories denoting relatives older than ego, suggesting that these are the dimensions where the changes in kinship terminologies initiate. Changes in kin terms denoting more senior relatives may be connected with the cross-cultural finding that younger relatives address them more often with a kin term, whereas the seniors are more likely to use personal names to address their younger relatives (Fleming and Slotta, 2018). Young people are typically seen as the innovators in situations of language change (Labov, 2001), thus they could be suggested to have a role also in the borrowings of kinship terms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages

Honkola,

Jordan

2023

J. Lang. Contact

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The universality of kinship terms means they are regarded, like much basic vocabulary, as resistant to borrowing. Kin term borrowings are documented at varying frequencies, but their role in the dynamics of change in this core social domain is understudied. We investigated the dimensions and the sociolinguistic contexts of kinship borrowings with 50 kinship categories from a global sample of 32 languages, a subset extracted from the World Loanword Database. We found that more borrowings take place in affinal kin categories and in generations denoting relatives older than ego. Close kin categories also have borrowings, but the borrowed items usually coexist with other, presumably non-borrowed variants. Colonisation and the spread of cultures and religions were main inducing forces for kin term borrowings; new terms often enter a language via bilingualism. These tentative patterns can be studied further with larger datasets in future systematic studies of kinship borrowings.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages

Honkola,

Jordan

2023

J. Lang. Contact

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“…14. Fleming and Slotta (2018), in their investigation into terms of address, find the crosscultural predominance of this pattern of address, whereby kin terms are employed for generations above ego (due to the honorific character of these lexical expressions), and proper names for the younger generation ("anti-honorifics"). 15.…”

Section: Consanguineal Kin Terminologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Anthropological Linguistics

2024

Culture and Language Use

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This collection presents new research on key topics in anthropological linguistics, with a focus on African languages. While Africanist linguists have long been concerned with sociocultural aspects of language structure and use, no comprehensive volume dedicated to the anthropological linguistics of Africa has yet been published. This volume seeks to fill this gap. The chapters address a broad range of topics in anthropological linguistics, including classic themes such as spatial reference, color, kin terms, and emotion, as well as emerging interests in the linguistic expression of personhood, sociality, and language ideology. All contributions are based on original empirical research and present insights into African language practices from a sociocultural perspective. The volume showcases research on dozens of African languages spoken across the continent, with particular emphasis on languages of East Africa. This book will be of interest to areal specialists as well as to anthropological linguists worldwide.

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“…Importantly, kinship relationality is signified in a quite distinct way here than in the kinship restricted systems that we looked at above. In these cases, the T‐V distinction diagrams a hierarchical, asymmetric schema of seniority within the cognatic kin group (Fleming and Slotta 2018), rather than a symmetric schema of mutual avoidance like the one found in T‐V systems restricted to in‐laws, to cross‐sex siblings, or to members of disharmonic generations. (Observe, however, that in hierarchical systems, V is often employed reciprocally between affinal relations, for instance in Tamil [Levinson 1982] and Yemsa.…”

Section: Fractal Hierarchical T‐v Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dispensing with Europe: A comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific pronouns

Fleming¹

2022

J Linguistic Anthropol

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The study of pronominal address in European languages is enriched by a comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific registers of person deixis. In European speech communities, token‐sourced interdiscursivity plays a crucial role in framing the meaning of honorific (V) and nonhonorific (T) pronouns; the pronouns exchanged between members of an interlocutor dyad in a given discursive event presuppose the use of those same pronouns in sequentially prior events of interaction between that dyad. The shift from V to T within a serially ordered speech chain of discursive events ‐ sanctified in the interaction ritual of ‘dispensation’ ‐ is the pivot of the system, emblematizing a mutual incorporation of alter into the relatively ‘intimate’ sphere of interpersonal relationality. Beyond Europe, T‐V systems typically rely more heavily on type‐sourced interdiscursivity. In these cases, use of T or V stereotypically indexes particular social categories of person or relationship. There are profound formal‐functional convergences in honorific person deixis cross‐linguistically, like the use of nonsingular number to index deference. Nevertheless, there are important differences too. The pragmatic structures characterizing honorific registers of person deixis are shown to co‐vary in important ways with this distinction between token‐sourced and type‐sourced social meaningfulness of pronominal alternants.

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The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances

Cited by 17 publications

References 65 publications

Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages

Kin Term Borrowings in the World’s Languages

Anthropological Linguistics

Dispensing with Europe: A comparative linguistic anthropology of honorific pronouns

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