Terms of address and their interplay with pronouns of address in a

Terms of address and their interplay with pronouns of address in a corpus of
modern French films
Within the framework of the project undertaken by the Department of Romance Languages of the
University of Helsinki, various conditions of usage of terms of address in French, Italian and
Spanish are being studied. I propose to examine the usage of terms of address (e.g. bonjour
Monsieur / Monsieur Dufayel / Lucien) and their interaction with pronouns of address (e.g. vous +
Monsieur, vous + Monsieur Dufayel, vous + Edith, tu + Lucien) in a corpus of modern French
films.
Lexical terms of address have received relatively little attention and have been studied
mainly in connection with written language (e.g. Claudel (2004), Grimaud (1989)). Linguists have
been more interested in pronouns of address, which have been studied mostly with the help of
questionnaires revealing speakers’ own opinions on their usage habits (e.g. Havu (2004), GardnerChloros (1991)). Films – although they don’t contain authentic, spontaneous spoken language –
reflect address usage in society and have for two reasons proved to be a fruitful study subject: first,
communication situations and relationships between people change and evolve as in real life, and
second, a corpus of this kind would be difficult to obtain only by recording examples of actual
speech.
In their groundbreaking article, Brown and Gilman (1960) introduced power and
solidarity semantics: power semantics appear in situations where speakers use different pronouns of
address, tu ( 2nd person singular pronoun) vs. vous ( 2nd person plural pronoun); if the same pronoun
of address is used, especially tu, it pertains to solidarity semantics.
However, not all variations in term-of-address usage can be explained by Brown and
Gilman’s theory. First of all, the use of the same pronoun of address does not necessarily imply
solidarity – lexical terms of address must also be taken into account. In modern French, it is
common to address a person using forms containing features from both categories
(power/solidarity), e.g. vous + first name; this is called American style by Ager (1990). If a superior
addresses e.g. his secretary by using V + first name, but the latter replies using V +
Monsieur/Docteur, this is not a solidarity relationship, despite the same pronoun of address being
used. The above-mentioned forms can also be used reciprocally: e.g. friends might use V + first
name when meeting their friends’ partners/friends and also be themselves addressed in this way.
Analysis according to power and solidarity semantics does not seem to be the most suitable in these
cases.
The study of the film corpus has shown that there is quite a lot of variation in the use of
terms of address and pronouns. In addition to age, degree of acquaintance and speech situation (e.g.
work, home, business), other determining factors are feelings (e.g. anger, love) and personal
preferences. The sentence type is also an influencing factor with regard to to the usage frequency of
terms of address: they are used particularly in greetings, imperative forms and questions.
Bibliography
Ager, Dennis E. (1990) Sociolinguistics and contemporary French. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Brown, Roger & Gilman, Albert (1960) “The pronouns of power and solidarity.” Fishman Joshua A. (ed.) Readings in
sociology of language. Mouton & Co, Hague, 252-275.
Claudel, Chantal (2004): ”De l’utilisation du système d’adresse dans l’interview de presse écrite française.” Langage et
société no 108. ”Comment tu m’parles!” Les pronoms d’adresse : langue et discours.
http://cvc.cervantes.es/obref/coloquio_paris/ponencias/pdf/cvc_claudel.pdf
Gardner-Chloros, Penelope (1991) « Ni tu ni vous : principes et paradoxes dans l’emploi des pronoms d’allocution en
français contemporain. » Journal of French Language Studies. September 1991 1/2. Pp. 139–155.
Grimaud, Michel (1989) ”Les appellatifs dans le discours. Madame, Mademoiselle, Monsieur avec et sans nom
propre.” Le français moderne. Avril 1989. 1 / 2 (numéro spécial), 54–78.
Havu, Eva (forthcoming in Actes du XXIV Congrès de Linguistique et de philologie romanes (Aberystwyth 2-5 août
2004)) ”L’emploi des pronoms d’adresse dans deux villes françaises. ”