Forms of Address

Abstract

In outlining the general goals for this book in Chapter 2, we stressed the importance of investigating ways in which linguistic features may become resources in constructing identities and space in an immigrant context, and that these resources may, in fact, be used differently from the way they are used in non-migration contexts for the same language. In this chapter, we focus on the use of forms of address, including choices among second-person pronouns, names, and kinship terms. We consider variation in usage of forms of address as a potential practice of positioning (cf. Chapter 2), which is a process by which interactants make their orientations toward social categories relevant (Harré and van Langenhove 1991, van Langenhove and Harré 1993). As discussed in Chapter 2, positioning in this sense is then one way of indexing relationships to constructed sociolinguistic spaces, and forms of address are resources to be able to do so.